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MODERN POETS 



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CHRISTIAN TEACHING 



TENNYSON 

BY 

WILLIAM EMORY SMYSER 






NEWYORKiEATON&MAINS 
CINCINNATI : JENNINGS & GRAHAM 



7K s^i^ 



IlSITaHY of CONGRESS 
1 Two CoDtes Received 

' COPY B. ^ 



Copyright, 1906, by 
EATON & MAINS. 



f 

1 



IN MEMORIAM. M. L. S. 
1841-1900 



CONTENTS 

Chapter Paob 

I. Tennyson, and the Religious Movements of His Time 9 

II. " In Memoriam" : The Record of a Spiritual Struggle 39 

III. The Answer to Materialism -- 77 

IV. Of the Ethical and Social Bearings of Tennyson's 

Philosophy 131 

V. The Spiritual Symbolism of the "Idylls of the King" 155 

VI. The Last Poems of Faith 198 

Index 205 



PREFACE 

The following chapters have been written in 
accordance with a single purpose — to present 
as simply and directly as possible those poems of 
Tennyson in which he has given expression to the 
fundamental principles of his faith. In the inter- 
pretation of these poems I have availed myself 
of whatever comments the poet himself may from 
time to time have made upon them and of such 
parallel passages as serve to illuminate his mean- 
ing; and, whenever the knowledge would enable 
the reader the better to understand his philosophy 
and enter into its full significance, I have sought 
to relate the poems to the circumstances and 
conditions in contemporary thought, or in the 
life of the poet, that prompted their utterance 
and determined their content: but I have striven 
always, not to enforce a personal view, but to let 
the poet speak for himself directly through his 
lines and images to the consciousness of the 
reader. To attempt to formulate Tennyson's 
philosophy in the definite and narrow limits of 
doctrine or creed — particularly inasmuch as this 
is what he himself refused to do, and since poetry, 

like religion, belongs to the realm of imagination 

7 



8 Preface 

and feeling rather than to that of the logical 
faculty alone — ^were an impertinence both to the 
poet and to his poetry from which it is hoped this 
little volume is entirely free. 

W. E. S. 

The quotations from the poems of Tennyson 
follow the text of the Globe Edition, published 
by The Macmillan Company (1900). 



CHAPTER I 

TENNYSON, AND THE RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS 
OF HIS TIME 

The age of Tennyson was an age of deep- 
seated uncertainty in matters of faith, an age of 
profound spiritual discontent. This uncertainty 
was consequent in part upon the constant enlarge- 
ment through scientific inquiry of the horizon of 
the known, and the unsettlement of belief that 
attended it; but in particular upon the rapid 
shifting of the grounds of faith, which this larger 
knowledge compelled, from the authority of dog- 
ma as represented in the Church, to that higher 
and more commanding authority established in 
the inner consciousness of men, to the inward 
evidence transcending sense and intellect and 
independent of formal creed. On the ather hand, 
the spiritual discontent of the age arose, not 
simply from this perplexity as to what to believe 
and why, but in large degree from the frank 
recognition, especially on the part of the generation 
coming into manhood with Tennyson in the early 
"thirties" of the last century, that the type of 
Christianity then embodied in belief, both with- 
in and without the English Church, was utterly 

9 



10 Tennyson 

inadequate to satisfy the yearnings of the time 
for a religion that could be brought as a vital 
force into every phase of human activity; that 
the v^orld, in short, stood in need of a purer and 
more effective type of Christianity than was 
represented by the cold and lifeless formalism of 
the English Establishment, or by Dissent with its 
narrowness of spirit, the trudeness of its creeds 
and philosophy, and the baldness of its forms 
of worship — its bleak and unlovely chapels where, 
according to Tennyson in "Sea Dreams," the 
heated pulpiteer too frequently. 

Not preaching simple Christ to simple men, 
Announced the coming doom, and fulminated 
Against the scarlet woman and her creed. 

This very discontent, this inquietude of mind and 
uneasiness of spirit, however, contributed in the 
end to a conspicuous enlargement of the religious 
consciousness of England, and issued finally in an 
earnest and continuous endeavor to better the 
social and moral condition of men here below 
while preparing them for a life of spiritual happi- 
ness above the clouds. 

Of this religious history the poetry of Tennyson 
is, within the limits of art, a beautiful and sig- 
nificant record. Of the weariness and futility of 
much of the religious activity of the period he has 
drawn vivid and striking pictures, and by almost 



Religious Movements of His Time it 

every aspect of the religious conditions of his time 
— by the uncertainty, the discontent, and the 
larger faith — he was profoundly influenced; and 
in turn he profoundly influenced his age in its 
struggle against despair, in its ultimate emergence 
into the calm of spiritual certitude, and in the 
determination of its spiritual aspirations in an 
active and sincere religious life. In common with 
many of the noblest spirits of his generation, he 
breathed in the doubt and discontent that were 
everywhere in the air during his young manhood; 
and like many of his contemporaries he broke 
through the mists that stifled him, won for himself 
the faith that lives in honest doubt, and became 
for them and for his generation the single voice 
to express in undying song the story of a common 
struggle and the elementary truths of a hard-won 
faith, the inspired priest and prophet to receive 
the truth as it was revealed to him, and to declare 
it to the eager hearing of a doubting and tempest- 
driven age. 

What, then, it is pertinent to inquire more 
specifically, were the cross-currents and baffling 
winds that formed this turbulence of waters and 
rendered spiritual navigation so difficult and 
dangerous during the period of the poet's lifetime .? 
For, if one would secure a clear appreciation of 
the nature of Tennyson's service to his time and 



12 Tennyson 

of the significance of his religious message, it is 
necessary to observe the occasion that prompted 
his poetry and the influences that in part at least 
determined its expression. 

And first of the Church itself, the visible symbol 
of authority in religion and the repository of the 
faith: though still imperious in tone and manner, 
her voice had sadly lost its power to persuade 
or induce obedience. Secure in her possessions, 
her privileges, and dignities, she had fallen into 
a decent and quiet worldliness which utterly 
obscured in the person of many of her priests and 
bishops a sense of the sacredness of their obliga- 
tions or the high seriousness of their mission. 
They were Christian gentlemen, to be sure — 
for the Wesleyan revival had made the fox-hunting 
parson of an earlier century impossible; men of 
culture and refinement, influential in the com- 
munities in which they lived. Their homes — ^and 
Tennyson, it should be remembered, was born and 
reared in one of these English rectories — were 
centers of what has been spoken of as the chief 
beauty of the English Church in those days, its 
family life of purity and simplicity.' But they 
were almost wholly untouched by spiritual fervor. 
Here and there in English churches, it is true, 
the altar fires were kept aglow by parish priests of 

^ Church, The Oxford Movement, p. 4. 



Religious Movements of His Time 13 

a devoted and genial piety who labored faithfully 
in the discharge of their parochial duties. No 
story of faith and devotion, for example, of purity 
and godliness, is more grateful in the retrospect 
than that of Maria Hare^ and the circle of men 
and women among whom her life was passed — 
Heber, and Hare, and Stanley in chief. Even to 
this day the fragrant memory of Reginald Heber 
clings about Hodnet Rectory, with its flowers, its 
park-fields, its pleasant walks, and green gate — a 
man of whom It has been said that his love of 
letters might have made him, like so many of the 
clergy of the time, an inactive parish priest; but 
that instead his "duty seemed to be his delight, 
his piety an instinct," and that he "was daily 
amongst his parishioners, advising them In dif- 
ficulties, comforting them in distress, kneeling 
often at the hazard of his own life, by their sick- 
beds; exhorting, encouraging, reproving as he saw 
need; when there was strife, the peacemaker; 
when there was want, the cheerful giver." And 
who, having once read the beautiful story of 
Augustus Hare, as told by his wife after his un- 
timely death, and of those five peaceful years 
of self-devotion to his little flock in Alton parish, 



1 As it is given in Memorials of a Quiet Life, by her foster-son, 
A. J. C. Hare. ^ . 

2 Quarterly Review for 1827, as quoted in Memorials of a Quiet 
Life, vol. i, p. 20. 



14 Tennyson 

can ever forget his delight in administering to the 
temporal comfort of his poor people, his lively 
concern for all their interests, their worldly as 
well as their spiritual welfare, and the power and 
simplicity of his appeals that awakened among 
the most sluggish of them the grateful apprehen- 
sion that "Mr. Hare does long to save our souls" ? 
There was also, it should be remembered, at 
Alderley, Edward Stanley, who came to be called 
"a Methodist," for "the discharge of duties which 
would now be deemed too common to deserve 
notice"^ — a significant commentary indeed upon 
the indifference of the Church to the spiritual 
welfare of those among whom she should have 
found it her pleasure to minister. 

For these were rare exceptions to the general 
rule of the clergy, and serve only to relieve what 
would otherwise be too dark and disheartening a 
picture. Stanley's predecessor at Alderley used 
to boast that "he had never set foot in a poor 
person's cottage." Hare found the people of 
the neighboring parish of Alton-Priors as sheep 
having no shepherd — ^their clergyman came from 
a distance only once in three weeks to perform 
service in the church, and in the intermediate time 
took no notice of them whatever. The churches 
everywhere throughout England were likewise in 

1 Stoughton, History of Religion in England, vol. vii, chap. iii. 



Religious Movements of His Time 15 

a sad condition of dilapidation and decay, uncared 
for, dirty, dismal, neglected/ When young Kings- 
ley, in 1842, "saved from the wild pride and 
darkling tempests of skepticism," first went down 
as curate to the neglected parish of Eversley, amid 
the fir forests and moors of Hampshire, he found 
the water for baptism held in a cracked kitchen 
basin, the alms collected in an old wooden saucer, 
the church empty, and the communicants few.'' 
Even in Westminster Abbey the service in these 
barren times was cold and perfunctory, a few 
candles glimmering here and there on a winter's 
afternoon, a few strangers scattered about the 
choir, while surpliced clerks listlessly performed 
their offices/ Mrs. Carlyle, writing from Troston 
Rectory, where she was a guest in 1842, draws a 
melancholy picture that is typical of the wide- 
spread indifference of the Church and clergy to 
the high duties to which they were appointed. 
"I went into the church last night with Reginald," 
she says, "and when I looked at him and it, and 
thought of the four hundred and fifty living 
souls who were to be saved through such means, 
I could almost have burst into tears. Anything 
so like the burial-place of revealed religion you 
have never seen, nor a rector more fit to read its 

^ See Stoughton, ibid., chap. iv. 

2 Charles Kingsley: Letters and Memories of His Life, p. 77. 

'Stoughton, ibid., p, 150. 



i6 Tennyson 

burial service." The church bells here were rung 
duly each morning and evening, she assures her 
husband — ^but to send the gleaners into the fields 
or to call them home, and not to summon them to 
prayers. On Sunday, she continues, the sermon 
was read by the rector, "who had scraped together 
as many written by other people as would last 
him for years," and who "read with a noble 
disdain of everything in the nature of a stop, 
pausing just when he needed breath, at the 
end of a sentence or in the middle of a word, 
as it happened!'* "And this," she concludes, 
"was the gospel of Jesus Christ I was hearing — 
made into something worse than the cawing of 
rooks."^ 

It is no wonder, then, that the Church, grown 
thus sluggish and torpid, was estranging the 
affections and forfeiting the allegiance of many of 
the serious and eager young men, who, like Tenny- 
son, were nurtured in her bosom during the first 
quarter of the nineteenth century; or that when 
the storms came and they stood in a dark per- 
plexity of mind and soul they were reluctant to 
turn to her for refuge and spiritual enlightenment. 
Something of Tennyson's fierce wrath and indig- 
nation against her finds utterance in one of his 



'Jane Welch Carlyle: Letters and Memorials, vol. i, p. 122. 



Religious Movements of His Time 17 

early sonnets — ^that "To J. M. K." — ^in which he 
hails, in the person of his friend Kemble, 

A latter Luther, and a soldier-priest 

To scare church-harpies from the master's feast; 

one who is 

no Sabbath-drawler of old saws, 
Distill'd from some worm-canker'd homily, 

but who, 

hating to hark 
The humming of the drowsy pulpit-drone 
Half God's good Sabbath, 

will "shoot into the dark Arrows of lightnings." 

But the Church was more than sluggish; she 
was as incapable of comprehending the mental 
difficulties peculiar to the field of religious 
thought at that time as she was unready to 
administer to the deepest spiritual needs of men. 
Her days of visitation had come upon her; her 
very foundations seemed to be disintegrating 
before the assaults of those who were attacking 
her exclusive political rights and privileges, but 
still more under the implications of an enlarging 
body of scientific truth that appeared to contro- 
vert some of her dearest tenets. But instead of 
addressing herself to the correction of the abuses 
that had grown up in her courts, and to the 
reconciliation of the new thought of the age 
with the truth that had been reposed in her. 



i8 Tennyson 

she seized upon her ancient weapon of authority 
and found it ineffective in her hands. To the 
intolerance of youthful enthusiasm she seemed 
to put herself on the side of injustice, oppression, 
and untruth. Against the advancing wave of 
reform, which was to sweep away many grave 
evils within the Establishment itself, as well as to 
extend to Catholic and Dissenter alike certain 
rights denied for many years on the ground of 
political expediency — 3. movement into which 
young Tennyson at the university threw himself 
heart and soul — the interposition of the veto of the 
Church was as futile as the memorable attempt 
of Dame Partington with her mop and pattens 
to stem the tide of the sea as it rose on the beach. 
Moreover, the spirit of free inquiry, which in 
the eighteenth century, in spite of the stupid 
hostility of dogmatic religion, had unrolled an 
infinitude of space beyond the range of the tele- 
scope to pierce, and even whirled away the solid 
earth from beneath the feet of man, was now in the 
early nineteenth century revealing a like infinity 
of time behind the story of creation and human 
history. It became evident that creation was no 
sudden act, as the Scriptures were understood to 
declare, but a gradual process through millions 
of years; that life was no recent generation, but 
existed at periods too remote for man to measure; 



Religious Movements of His Time 19 

that man himself was hoary with ages uncounted 
long before the date ascribed to his origin in the 
traditional chronology. And all this was utterly 
inconsistent with the teachings of the Church 
and her insistence upon a narrow interpretation 
of the biblical record. When finally the conflict 
ended and the smoke cleared away, the whole 
fabric of authority was found to be undermined, 
and the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy, upon 
which it was established, fallen and no longer 
tenable. Further, even while Newman and the 
leaders of the Oxford Movement were arguing 
for the dogmatic principle against the spirit of 
free inquiry, science was subjecting to her flat 
denial the old theistic argument from design. 
Instances of what had been supposed to be the 
result of design were shown to be in fact merely 
the outcome of the operation of purely physical 
causes. And at length in the face of the con- 
sternation and stupidity of the Church it was 
asserted that the existence of God is not at all 
necessary to explain any of the phenomena of the 
universe. 

The result of the hostility of the Church to the 
principle of reform and to the teachings of the 
new science was a long and bitter controversy 
in which reason won against ignorance and a 
wider knowledge against an outworn creed. But 



20 Tennyson 

as long as the struggle persisted there was ques- 
tion and despair in many a brave heart, and many 
a face blanched at the very edge of the abyss in 
the hidden depth of which was heard only 

an ever-breaking shore 
That tumbled in the Godless deep. 

Here Tennyson himself stood in the bitterness 
of sorrow, when the sudden death of his friend 
Hallam plunged upon him all the doubts and 
perplexities of the time. Much of his poetry, 
indeed, between 1833 and 1850 was born of his 
personal conflict with the dark creatures of the 
mind that sad event aroused. In "The Two 
Voices" (1833) the persistent question put itself. 

Thou art so full of misery, 
Were it not better not to be ? — 

a question for which he could find no certain reply, 
though a hidden hope was whispered by a second 
voice so sweet in its accents that the "dark" one 
is silenced. "In Memoriam," too, in its early 
lyrics is charged with the passion arising from 
doubt and spiritual struggle; until at length, after 
the poet has emerged into the light and peace 
of spiritual assurance, it strikes the higher note 
of religious certitude — that 

all is well, tho' faith and form 
Be sundered in the night of fear. 



Religious Movements of His Time 21 

But while Tennyson in 1849 ^^^ writing the 
lyric that stands as prologue to "In Memoriam" 
and expressing therein, as the final fruit of his 
long struggle, his unshaken faith in that "Strong 
Son of God, Immortal Love," whom he had come 
to know through the tutelage of grief, many of 
his contemporaries were passing into a spiritual 
darkness from the shadow of which they never 
completely escaped. Such was Clough, whose 
poetry, in its spirit of doubt and struggle, 
yet of unshaken assurance of the final conquest 
of truth and good, is representative of the habits 
of thought and sentiment of many in those 
days. Drawn into the very heart of the storm 
that was raging at Oxford, unable to accept for 
his doubts and perplexities the solution which 
the sweet voice of Newman was offering Sunday 
after Sunday in the pulpit of Saint Mary's, he 
left the university, his singing took a troubled 
note of contention and spiritual tempest, and he 
died in the midst of a futile quest for that **fugi- 
tive and gracious light" which leaves the seeker 
"still untired." And yet, amid all his skepticism, 
he retained a "pure reverence for the inner light 
of the spirit, and of entire submission to its 
guidance.'" Such, also, was Matthew Arnold, 



1 Cf. the poems "Qui Laborat, Orat," "SummumPulchrum," and 
"The New Sinai." 



22 Tennyson 

his friend and Oxford companion, for whom "the 
sea of faith was once too at the full," but who 
in these days now heard only 

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 
Retreating, to the breath 
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear 
And naked shingles of the world. 

It is, however, significant of Tennyson — and the 
burden of "In Memoriam" in particular — that 
while so many of those about him were thus 
thrown upon the thorns of unbelief, he almost 
alone among the poets of his time faced the reve- 
lations of the new science and brought them into 
harmony with the eternal verities of religion. 
And this he did by the sheer force of a strong 
native philosophy; not by dogmatism — that was 
as impossible for him as for Arnold and Clough. 
"Humility," says his son, "he invariably believed 
to be the only true attitude of the human soul 
in regard to what he called 'these unfathomable 
mysteries,' as befitting one who knew that the 
Finite can by no means grasp the Infinite."^ 
The scientific, not the dogmatic, view of things 
dominates his poetry, as the scientific temper 
dominates his habits of thought.' Keble, the 

^ Cf. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, vol. i, p. 316. 

^ Tennyson was altogether untouched by the influences of the 
Oxford Movement, as his poetry attests. An interesting confirma- 
tion of the fact is found in the reminiscences of Dr. Bradley, Dean 
of Westminster, who in the summer of 1841 and 1842 saw much of 
Tennyson during visits to Park House: "The questions that stirred 



Religious Movements of His Time 23 

poet of the Tractarians, might argue against 
geology that fossils are merely the products of an 
instantaneous act of creation; and in his verse 
force nature into a sacerdotal form consistent 
with the liturgy of the Church of England. But 
Tennyson, inspired by the nevi^ knowledge which 
a poetic instinct enabled him to interpret to the 
consciousness of the age, read the unattainable 
secret of the universe in the "flower in the cran- 
nied wall," and under all the phenomena of nature 

traced 

One God, one law, one element, 
And one far-ofE divine event, 
To which the whole creation moves. 

In this lies one of the highest services he 
rendered his generation in the writing of "In 
Memoriam" — in his profound interpretation of 
the truths of religion in terms of the new and 
larger knowledge, in respect to some aspects of 
which he anticipated the thought of a later day; 
but most of all he served his age in his recognition, 
amid all the uncertainties of the time, of the 
necessity of faith to man, and of the legitimacy 
and value of the spiritual intuitions. When the 
voice of authority and dogma was discredited, and 

so deeply our seniors and ourselves at Oxford, the position of J. H. 
Newman and his friends, the course of the Oxford Movement, the 
whole Tractarian Controversy, were scarcely mentioned, or, if men- 
tioned, were spoken of as matters of secondary or remote interest." 
Cf. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, vol. i, p. 204. 



24 Tennyson 

the logical defenses of religion established by an 
earlier age were swept away by the strong current 
of scientific truth; when theories of ecclesiastical 
polity were undergoing change, theological sys- 
tems were melting away, and creeds were being 
cast aside as outworn and useless; when the the- 
ory of scriptural inerrancy was broken down, and 
controversies raged everywhere on the fundamen- 
tals of faith, the poet was finding a ground of 
certainty in religion unassailable by the growing 
body of scientific truth, by critical theory, or 
metaphysical speculation. He found it in the 
sacred recesses of man's nature, in 

the silent Word 
Of that world-prophet in the heart of man. 

And to this position both science and philosophy 
are to-day giving the assent of their reason. 
Through his faith in the spiritual intuitions he 
was able to emerge from the mists that shut him 
in, into a clearer atmosphere where free sky was 
visible and the stars; and to become the prophet 
and spiritual leader to those who also after toil and 
storm attained a purer air. Mr. Froude,^ speak- 
ing of himself and others at this time and of 
their experience, tells how the lightships were all 
adrift, the compasses all awry, and there was 

1 Thomas Carlyle: Life in London, vol. i, p. 248. 



Religious Movements of His Time 25 

nothing then to steer by except the stars. "In 
this condition/' he says, "the best and bravest 
of my contemporaries determined to have done 
with insincerity, to find ground under their feet, 
to let the uncertain remain uncertain, but to 
learn how much and what they could honestly 
regard as true, and believe that and live by it. 
Tennyson became the voice of this feeling in 
poetry; Carlyle in . . . prose. . . . Tennyson's 
poems, the group of poems which closed with *In 
Memoriam,' became to many of us what the 
'Christian Year,' was to orthodox Churchmen. 
We read them, and they became part of our 
minds, the expression in exquisite language of the 
feelings which were working in ourselves." 

The conditions under which Tennyson passed 
his earlier years were, indeed, fortunate. He was 
not brought under the stress of troublous thinking 
prematurely. The influences of his father's house 
had fostered in him that purity and simplicity of 
character for which the rectories of England were 
at this time notable; and it may fairly be surmised, 
also, that he derived from his father, who, though 
he had no real calling for the ministry, yet faith- 
fully strove to do his duty and was considerably 
in advance of his age in his theological opinions,^ 
an attitude toward religious thought which 

* Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, vol. i, p. 14. 



26 Tennyson 

enabled him, in a trying time when creeds were 
crumbHng and dogmas were passing away, to 
"ding to faith beyond the forms of faith,'' and 
to reexpress his faith in accordance with the newer 
knowledge. Moreover, even in early boyhood, 
before the distracting currents of religious contro- 
versy had begun to strain the cables of his faith, 
there grew upon his consciousness profound inti- 
mations of the reality of the unseen, which, felt 
at first perhaps only as vague trains of thought, 
were to issue under the compulsion of sorrow 
into light and clearness, and become the saving 
principle of his philosophy. There were seasons 

when 

The mortal limit of the Self was loosed 
And past into the Nameless, as a cloud 
Melts into heaven, — 

experiences which, he says, are *'unshadowable in 
words," but which without doubt were so real 
as to keep him true, amid the deadening influences 
of materialism, to the spiritual interpretation of 
the universe, and to attest for him the validity 
of the spiritual instincts against the rationaliz- 
ing processes of science that were to tend to its 
denial. 

In addition to this, when Tennyson first went 
down to Cambridge in 1829, breathing the air 
of the new day just risen over "awakened Albion," 



Religious Movements of His Time 27 

and felt his pulses leap with the large excitement 
of the time — and many of the lines of "Locksley 
Hall" throb with the hopeful enthusiasm of this 
morning of the century — it was to find the univer- 
sity, to be sure, the center of much unsettlement 
of opinion among her men, but an unsettlement 
of belief which was accompanied by an elevation 
of religious tone prophetic of the larger Chris- 
tianity about to sweep over England. His tutor 
was Whewell, who, with Sedgwick in the realm 
of physical science, was making researches that 
forced the abandonment of the narrow interpre- 
tation of the Scriptures concerning the history of 
creation, at the same time that he was upholding 
the authority of the Bible on the grounds of the 
depth of its appeal to the highest aspirations and 
strongest needs of the human heart. Moreover, 
the philosophy of Coleridge, a potent influence 
in the higher regions of religious thought, was 
everywhere in the university "reforming all our 
notions," as Fitzgerald, who was an undergrad- 
uate with Tennyson, has said. "A true sovereign 
of English thought," to use the words of Julius 
Hare, he was even then a wide-reaching and 
significant force in the renovation of the current 
religious ideas of the age, and in the establish- 
ment of the spiritual grounds of faith in Christian- 
ity and the Bible, in spite of numerous contra- 



28 Tennyson 

dictions and inaccuracies of statement that were 
being pointed out in the biblical record. His 
influence at Cambridge was perpetuated in large 
measure through the "Apostles' Club," of which 
Tennyson was an early member. It had been 
established a few years before by Maurice, who 
acknowledges that Coleridge had done much to 
preserve him from infidelity,^ and of whom Hallam, 
writing to Gladstone, says, "The effect which 
he has produced on the minds of many at Cam- 
bridge by the single creation of that Society of 
'Apostles' (for the spirit though not the form was 
created by him) is far greater than I can dare to 
calculate, and will be felt, both directly and 
indirectly, in the age that is upon us."^ It was 
under such influences as these that Tennyson 
received the philosophical principle, already at- 
tested by experience, that was later to verify 
itself amid the tempests of doubt and to hold him 
true to the faith amid the dark uncertainties of a 
period of religious controversy. The youth who, 
in opposition to the current theistic philosophy 
of the time, voted "No" to a question propounded 
in a meeting of the "Apostles" — "Is an intelligent 
First Cause deducible from the phenomena of the 



^ Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, vol. i, p. 177. 

^ Under date of June 23, 1830. Cf. Life of Frederick Denison 
Maurice, vol. i, p. no; and Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, 
vol. i, p. 43- 



Religious Movements of His Time 29 

Universe ?" — who, in contradiction to the utili- 
tarian thought of the age, voted "Aye" to the 
question, "Is there any other rule of moral ac- 
tion beyond general expediency ?" — had taken his 
bent in independent religious thinking, a tendency 
that a few years later embodied itself in "In 
Memoriam" as the poetic expression of the spirit 
of that whole broad movement which found 
utterance likewise from the pulpit in the sermons 
of Maurice, Kingsley, and Robertson. 

It is not, however, in "In Memoriam" that 
the final or complete expression of Tennyson's 
religious message is to be found. That poem, 
suggestive as it is as the triumphant record of a 
soul at strife with human destiny, and in its 
presentation of "the indestructible and inalienable 
minimum of faith which humanity cannot give 
up because it is necessary for life," significant as 
it was to the generation to whom it came with all 
the force of a direct revelation of spiritual truth, 
yet gives us, when viewed by the large, only one 
phase of the poet's prophetic teaching, only a 
single aspect of his religious philosophy. The full 
orb of faith and of religious truth is rounded out 
in the poems that were written subsequent to 1850, 
under the stress of the most bitter conflict between 
science and religion the world has yet seen. The 
rise of the evolutionary doctrine in geology had 



30 Tennyson 

been opposed because it appeared to contradict 
the Scripture in regard to the antiquity of man 
and of the earth. But the publication of Dar- 
win's Origin of Species (1859) ^^^ understood 
to be directly subversive of all belief in God or 
spirit, and consequently hostile to the central 
truths of Christianity itself. Indeed, there was 
a widespread belief that, if once the theory of 
Evolution were generally accepted, Christianity 
was doomed to extinction. It is here, in holding 
the grounds of faith against the materialistic 
implications of evolution, and in interpreting 
evolution in terms of a vital and eager faith, that 
Tennyson rendered his greatest service to his 
time. 

The principle that man, at least so far as his 
physical nature is concerned, is the product of a 
long process of evolution, not only contradicts 
the biblical tale of the creation of Adam out of 
the dust of the ground, and of Eve out of one 
of Adam's ribs; it brings man face to face with 
the possibility that the human race itself came into 
existence only through the operation of purely 
physical causes, and that consequently there may 
be in the universe no higher being than he. The 
dreadful alternative thus suggested, with its awful 
implications between a Godless world and a world 
first imagined "in the silent mind of One all-pure," 



Religious Movements of His Time 31 

prompts Arnold's lines "In Utrumque Paratus" 
— lines charged to the full with his skeptical 
languor. In Swinburne, on the other hand, "the 
strict materialistic synthesis is clothed in its most 
splendid coloring,'' as he sings of "the gray 
beginning of years," of "the twilight of things 
that began," and of the earth, "Child, yet no 
child of the night, and motherless mother of 
men." The littleness of man before the splendid 
spectacle of the universe, his nothingness before 
the eternal forces of nature, the futility of his 
passions and ambitions, and the brevity of his 
day — all these themes he has touched with beauty 
and grace. 

We have drimken of Lethe at last, we have eaten of Lotus; 

What hurts it tis here that sorrows arise and die? 
We have said of the dream that caressed, and the terror 
that smote us, 

Good-night and good-bye. 

But against all these implications of materialism 
Tennyson resolutely sets his face; he never fails 
to set forth the naked despair which, as he 
believes, is the inevitable outcome of that view 
of the universe which omits a moral government, 
nor fails to show how faith in the moral order and 
purpose of creation removes the darkest problems 
and the bitterest fears of men. So his imagina- 
tion touched upon and illuminated a whole host 



32 Tennyson 

of perplexing questions — many of them leading 
far afield in metaphysics — which dogma had 
hitherto kept chained and asleep, but which were 
now set loose under the lash of materialism to 
haunt and torment the mind — problems concern- 
ing the origin and meaning of evil, the seeming 
waste and purposelessness of nature, the origin 
of the soul (if there be a soul), its immortality, 
and its relations with the divine, as well as the 
mutual relations subsisting between the physical 
nature of man and the psychical. This is the 
field of Tennyson's later religious poetry. Here 
he is heard as the singer of the larger hope amid 
the skeptical languor of the time, as the poet 
never hopeless of man's high destiny amid the 
sense of human littleness and the scorn of human 
feebleness, as the prophet of the essential spirit- 
uality of the universe against the materialism of 
science misinterpreted and of the gross anthropo- 
morphism of the Church. 

But while these movements were under way in 
the field of religious thought and belief, a change 
quite as conspicuous was working itself out in 
the field of religious practice. In general it may 
be said to have revealed itself as an enthusiasm 
for humanity; in a practical extension, that is, 
of the spirit of Christ regardless, and sometimes 
in spite, of formal creed, as a vital force per- 



Religious Movements of His Time 33 

meating the social fabric and animating all 
human conduct; in the increase of human sym- 
pathy, the establishment of nobler modes of life, 
sweeter manners, purer laws, in the removal of 
ancient abuses, the suppression of want and sin, 
and most of all in the growing hope of the race 
for the dawn of that higher civilization in which 
each man shall 



find his own in all men's good, 
And all men work in noble brotherhood. 



This spirit, in some cases, emerged from the 
speculations of agnostic science, and erected 
itself into a definite religious principle that 
took the place of a discarded creed. In the 
writings of George Eliot in particular this phase 
of thought manifested itself beautifully and 
profoundly: she bore witness continually to that 
"One comprehensive church, whose fellowship 
consists in the desire," as she expresses it in 
a letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe,^ "to purify 
and ennoble human life, and where the best 
members of all narrower churches may call 
themselves brother and sister in spite of differ- 
ences." In this church was to be found no power 



^George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, edited 
and arranged by J. W. Cross, vol. iii, p. 175. 



34 Tennyson 

of divine mystery, no heavenly guidance, no holy 
light, save only such 

as turns 
To energy of human fellowship ; 
No powers beyond the growing heritage 
That makes completer manhood. 



In other cases, however, both within and 
without the Church, this new philanthropy was 
not independent of belief in God; it was, indeed, 
often a natural reaction to the discontent felt in 
many quarters because the Church failed so 
signally to minister to the deepest needs of the 
human heart. It was a demand for reality in 
religion, to have done with pretense, to give 
to man's deepest and holiest thoughts and feel- 
ings direct expression in corresponding activities. 
That in the main is the burden of Carlyle's 
preaching, his words falling like the sound of ten 
thousand trumpets, we are told, on the ears of 
the younger generation — on men like Robertson, 
Charles Kingsley, and John Sterling, whom he 
inspired. It was the burden, too, of Ruskin's 
message after i860 — and the change in Ruskin 
is the change of the century — ^when he turned 
from beauty and art and the romance of the past 
to humanity and all the stern needs of the present. 
Coleridge, also, while living the life of a sage on 



Religious Movements of His Time 35 

Highgate Hill, was slowly but surely contributing 
by his writings and conversation — he lived until 
1834 — to the transformation of Christianity from 
a mere creed into a living mode of human activity. 
His influence acted upon such men within the 
Church as Robertson and Kingsley, who with 
Maurice — a "spiritual splendor" as Gladstone 
called him — were charging the whole fabric of the 
Church and of English civilization with the glow 
of a new spiritual energy. With this whole broad 
movement in its several aspects, but always 
directed by a genuinely religious and Christian 
spirit, Tennyson was always in vital sympathy — 
with some of its leaders, as with Maurice, who 
stood godfather to his eldest son,^ he was upon 
terms of a close personal intimacy. After the 
struggle was over of which "In Memoriam" is 
the record, he became in song the most inspiring 
interpreter of its high and noble purposes, of its 
hold upon the reality of religion in daily practice, 
of its humanitarian aims, and its devotion to the 
spirit of human progress. Turning aside from 
the grief which for so many years had engaged 
him, when he resumed his singing it was as the 
prophet of that larger Christianity which he 
foresaw, and he became in truth what he desired 



iCf. the lines addressed "To the Rev. F. D. Maurice ' (January, 



36 Tennyson 

to be — the "fuller minstrel/' who not only longed 
to hear the bells of the New Year 



Ring out the darkness of the land, 
Ring in the Christ that is to be, 

but did so much himself to set them ringing. 

It is in this aspect that his invention of a 
modern setting for an early poem on the death 
of Arthur is full of significance. In 1835/ accord- 
ing to Fitzgerald, Tennyson read from manu- 
script to a circle of friends his "Morte d'Arthur/' 
which with certain additions at the beginning and 
the end was to become in the completed series of 
the "Idylls" "The Passing of Arthur.'* It was 
then an epic, pure and simple, told with fine 
objectivity in noble and stately verse. But when 
it was first published, in 1842, the poet had 
invented for it an introduction and an epilogue, 
"to give a reason for telling an old-world tale," 
as Fitzgerald puts it. On the one hand in 
the prologue, with its group of college friends 
about an English fireside on Christmas Eve — 
and the incident which Fitzgerald records may 
have suggested the scene to the poet — is the 
parson in his drowsy, inept monologue on some 



^It appears that Tennyson was writing this poem as early as the 
close of 1833. Cf. Alfred^ Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, vol. i, p. 129; 
also p. 194. 



Religious Movements of His Time 37 

of the leading questions of the day affecting re- 
ligion — 

taking wide and wider sweeps, 
Now harping on the church-commissioners, 
Now hawking at Geology and schism; 

until he settled down at last 

Upon the general decay of faith 
Right thro' the world, "at home was little left 
And none abroad: there was no anchor, none 
To hold by,"— 

a type, to be sure, of the blind and unprogressive 
dogmatism of the day. On the other hand, the 
epilogue with its vision and its peal of Christmas 
bells gives utterance to all the eager hopes and 
ardent expectations of the age for a fairer faith 
and an effective religious activity. Arthur, in the 
epic, is represented as passing away across the 
mystic water to "the island-valley of Avilion," the 
cry upon his lips of a departing system — 

The old order changeth, yielding place to new, 
And God fulfills Himself in many ways. 

But in the vision with which the epilogue closes 
he is seen returning — 

King Arthur, like a modem gentleman 
Of stateliest port; and all the people cried, 
"Arthur is come again; he cannot die." 
Then those that stood upon the hills behind 
Repeated — "Come again, and thrice as fair;" 
And, further inland, voices echo'd — "Come 
With all good things, and war shall be no more." 



38 Tennyson 

Here the passing of Arthur is rendered typical of 
the passing away of an outworn civiHzation; and 
the vision of his return, blending with the music 
of the Christmas chimes, becomes the symbol of 
what in this fair beginning of a time was the 
deep desire of the age for the establishment of a 
higher and better order among the sons of men 
— a vision and a hope to which Tennyson has 
given frequent expression. 



CHAPTER II 

"IN MEMORIAM": THE RECORD OF A SPIRITUAL 
STRUGGLE 

The general condition of religious uncertainty 
and spiritual unrest which marked the period 
covered by the composition of "In Memoriam/' as 
well as the relation sustained by "In Memoriam" 
as a religious poem to the current religious thought 
of the time, have already been noted. It remains 
now to consider somewhat more minutely the 
poem itself, both as the record of a long and 
bitter personal contest with doubt and as the 
expression not alone of the faith to which Tenny- 
son himself attained after storm and difficulty, 
but of the ultimate faith of the age after its 
harassing battle with the forces of spiritual 
despair had been fought and won. 

Tennyson was, indeed, not altogether unac- 
quainted with sorrow at the time when the sudden 
death of Arthur Hallam plunged upon him all 
the dark questions of human destiny, and focused 
into a problem of vital personal concern all the 
dim perplexities which, while Hallam was with 
him, had been to them both merely the objects of 
an eager intellectual curiosity. His father had 

39 



40 Tennyson 

died early in the year 1831, shortly after the 
young poet had left Cambridge for the quiet and 
seclusion of Somersby and the wolds of Lincoln- 
shire. But his grief for his father, though deep 
and sincere, was tempered by something of a 
young man's natural feeling of wonder and awe 
as he stood for the first time in the silence and 
mystery of the grave. Always imaginative and 
with a strong sense of the reality of the unseen, 
as has been already observed, he slept in his 
father's bed within a week after his death, 
hoping that he might see his ghost. But no 
ghost came, of course; and he took solace in the 
thought that, though his father had died a little 
before his time, yet he had passed away in the 
ordinary course of nature and according to the 
established order of things. "Those we love 
first are taken first," he writes to James Spedding 
two years later and only a short time before the 
death of Hallam. 

God gives us love. Something to love 
He lends us; but, when love is grown 

To ripeness, that on which it throve 
Falls off, and love is left alone. 

In another poem,^ written evidently at the time 

i"On a Mourner," first published in 1865, but appearing in sub- 
sequent editions among the poems of 1832 and bearing internal 
evidence of composition about the time of Dr. Tennyson's death 
in March, 183 1. 



A Spiritual Struggle 41 

of his father's death and doubtless recording a 
personal experience, he tells how Nature urges the 
mourner into the fields in springtime, how "a 
deeper voice" teaches the sick heart to "incline 
to one wide Will," how Hope and Memory whis- 
per their comfort at twilight, and finally how 
"through silence and the trembling stars" Faith 
comes "from tracts no feet have trod." 

But this calmness of temper, this artless and 
unripe wisdom, was too conventional and tradi- 
tional, too tacit to confute the dim specters that 
haunt the wildernesses of human sorrow — they 
do not fade timidly away before the mere rite 
of bell and candle. When the floodgates of a 
strange and unplumbed personal grief were set 
open upon him the young poet was utterly over- 
whelmed and swept away from his accustomed 
moorings. The waters of doubt and spiritual 
despair that had their source far up among the 
springs of the new thought of the age and its 
consequent unsettlement of the strata of belief — 
waters which had been held back hitherto — now 
engulfed him. Question after question arising 
out of the uncertain and perilous generalizations 
from a new and unexplored realm of knowledge 
vexed him, so that he found no joy in living and 
longed for death. Life lost its meaning for him; 
it seemed but the fugitive and aimless flutter of 



42 Tennyson 

the moth about the flame, as he has expressed It 
in one of the first lyrics of "In Memoriam"; men 
only "cunning casts in clay"; the grave the end 
of all; Love no divinely spiritual principle, but 
a physical affinity — "mere fellowship of sluggish 
moods"; the universe a tangled web woven by 
the stars in their blind and purposeless motion 
through the heavens; the heavens themselves a 
dead expanse, a black void from which the very 
God had been withdrawn. A period of spiritual 
agony thus followed the death of Hallam, a pro- 
found darkness wherein of all his earlier faiths it 
seemed not one remained unchallenged and un- 
contradicted — only the will to cling to Love in 
spite of death and sorrow, and the native feeling 
— beautifully and simply expressed in the poem 
"Ulysses" — that it is far nobler to go forward and 
brave the struggle of life than to die, though 
infinitely more difficult. 

At first, in the anguish of his heart, the poet 
turned to song, finding in the "sad mechanic 
exercise" of "measured language" something that 
dulled and numbed his pain. In some such mood, 
one morning at five o'clock, between the blossom- 
ing hedges of a Lincolnshire lane — but with his 
thought far away where the waves were breaking 
upon the crags and the ships were sailing into the 
desired haven — he made what in the ways of a 



A Spiritual Struggle 



43 



thousand years Is the cry of the race in its yearning 

for the touch of a vanish'd hand, 
And the sound of a voice that is still. 

One lyric after another thus vibrated into words 
as one mood after another swept across his 
heart, many of them to be brought together 
finally and woven into the completed cycle that 
constitutes "In Memoriam." The progress of 
the seasons, the sad and sacred offices of the 
Church for the dead, the return of hallowed an- 
niversaries on the calendar of friendship, quick- 
ened recollections, sad and tender sometimes, and 
again charged with a fury and passion of grief 
that found their fitting image only in the winds 
of an autumn tempest that "roared from yonder 
dropping day" and "blew the rooks about the 
skies." And these entered into his song. Some- 
times he revisited the scenes of former associa- 
tions with his friend — he stood once more by the 
"dark house" in the "long unlovely street," 
where once he had been so warmly greeted by the 
voice now stilled, only to be overwhelmed with 
a sense of the utter blankness of life and the 
ghastliness of his desolation; or he walked again 
along the sacred paths and wooded alleys of 
Cambridge and Somersby, while from college 
fane, from river bank and hill and field, from 
grange and stile, from the trenched quarry and 



44 Tennyson 

"the sheepwalk up the windy wold," there 
breathed upon him everywhere the quiet memories 
of a kindlier day. And these, too, he sang. Some- 
times he meditated upon what the old philosophies 
had said concerning death and the destiny of the 
soul, upon the sacred implications of the story of 
Lazarus; or again the awful contradictions written 
in the tale of "Nature red in tooth and claw," and 
in the vicissitudes of human history, disturbed 
his repose and plunged him into the depths. 
And all this became the subject of his verse. 
Sometimes his native impulse to quit the cham- 
bers of his grief, to go out among men and there 
to be the "fuller minstrel," to herald "the closing 
cycle rich in good," awoke within him, and all his 
blood leaped with the vigor of a noble purpose. 
And this too he voiced in many of his lyrics. 
Thus the seasons came and went, through seven- 
teen years of changing scene and shifting thought 
and fancies, of growing desires and enlarging 
purposes. New perplexities were born of varying 
moods, new yearnings and new ambitions; the 
dark problems that made life so dread a mystery 
were by degrees shot through with a heavenly 
light, and others that arose became in turn 
illuminated by the radiance of a new hope; new 
thoughts, new fears, new faith — all these in turn 
became the motive of his song: a lyric here to 



A Spiritual Struggle 45 

ease a pain, to cry a passion, to declare a hope; 
a lyric there to celebrate a joy, to vindicate a 
faith, to sing a triumph, to announce a growing 
purpose.* 

In this way, under the varying conditions of 
time and circumstance, the lyrics of "In Memo- 
riam" were written. It was only after many 
of them had been thus made that they were 
woven into a poetic whole in accordance with a 
definite dramatic theme. While they constitute 
a splendid elegy, they at the same time become 
what in effect is a lyric drama of spiritual struggle 
and victory — like the Book of Job, a beautiful 
presentation of the spiritual processes whereby 
a perplexed and suffering heart, through sorrow 
and the agonies of doubt, rose to a higher concep- 
tion of God and a fuller knowledge of his ways with 
man than could possibly have attended a formal 
assent to a merely conventional creed; thereby 



i"It must be remembered that this is a poem, not a biography. 
It is founded on our friendship, on the engagement of Arthur Hallam 
to my sister, on his sudden death at Vienna just before the time 
fixed for their marriage, and on his burial at Clevedon Church. The 
poem concludes with the marriage of my youngest sister Cecilia. It 
was meant to be a kind of Divina Commedia, ending with happiness. 
The sections were written at many different places, and as the 
phases of our intercourse came to my memory and suggested them. 
I did not write them with any view of weaving them into a whole, 
or for publication, until I found that I had written so many. The 
different moods of sorrow as in a drama are dramatically given, and 
my conviction that fear, doubts, and suffering will find answer and 
relief only through Faith in a God of Love. ' I' is not always the 
author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking 
through him." Tennyson's comment as given in Alfred, Lord Tenny- 
son: A Memoir, vol. i, p. 304. 



46 Tennyson 

also certifying the truth of what the poet himself 
declared when, urged that "doubt is devil-born," 
he said. 

There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
BeHeve me, than in half the creeds. 

And, first, it should be observed in attempting 
an analysis of the poem, there are four clearly 
marked stages of spiritual development — four 
acts, so to say, in this drama of Love's conflict 
with death and doubt, and its ultimate triumph 
over all the elements of despair. After an intro- 
ductory lyric, which, though written last, stands 
as a prologue to the whole and constitutes a 
summary of the long struggle and its results in 
terms of faith, there is, first, a stage of the utter 
bewilderment of Love before the fact of death 
(lyrics I-XXVII); second, the questioning of 
Love before the mystery of death (lyrics XXVIII 
-LXXVII); third, the beginning of Love's con- 
tent in sacred recollections and a growing faith 
(lyrics LXXVIII-CIII); and fourth, the triumph 
of Love over the principle of spiritual disaster 
(lyrics CIV-CXXXI). And the poem concludes 
with an epilogue, a marriage hymn,^ in celebra- 
tion of the highest earthly type of that Love 

that rose on stronger wings, 
Unpalsied when he met with Death, 



'Written on the occasion of the marriage of Tennyson's younger 
sister, Cecilia, to Edmund Law Lushington, October 10, 1842. 



A Spiritual Struggle 47 

and came in spite of the contradictions of human 
history to see that the course of human things 
points to the high goal of a better race and more 
perfect civilization, 

Whereof the man, that with me trod 
This planet, was a noble type 
Appearing ere the times were ripe, 

That friend of mine who lives in God. 

Moreover, it should be remarked that these 
four sections are clearly set off by the lyrics in 
celebration of three successive Christmas sea- 
sons — for the poem in its completed form is 
compressed to cover a period of two years and a 
half — ^while within each section the progress of 
the months is also otherwise recorded by lyrics 
that reflect the changing passion of the poet as 
it is modified by time and by the gradual strength- 
ening of his faith, and as the varying aspects of 
nature under the circuit of the year are colored 
by his feelings. 

I. THE BEWILDERMENT OF LOVE 

The starting point of the spiritual movement, as 
has been said, is utter and blank bewilderment. 
Before the open grave Love stands in absolute 
confusion, clasping Grief lest "both be drown'd." 
Sorrow establishes an unbroken tyranny over the 
heart of the poet; as he walks in the churchyard 



48 Tennyson 

and stands beneath the immemorial yew, whose 
roots and fibers wrap themselves about the bones 
of the dead, and under whose shade 

the clock 
Beats out the little lives of men, 

he is overwhelmed by a sense of the brevity and 
futility of human life, so that he longs to grow 
incorporate into a similar hardihood of sullen 
gloom. His trouble haunts him by day and 
night — a trouble that none of the commonplaces 
of condolence can make less bitter, and that 
torments him even in his sleep, when the "will is 
bondsman to the dark." In his restless sorrow 
at early dawn he seeks the house where so often 
in the past he has felt the warm grasp of his 
friend's hand in greeting, but as he stands at the 
door the sense of his desolation sweeps over him, 
while 

far away 
The noise of life begins again, 
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain 
On the bald street breaks the blank day. 

But now the " fair ship " is bringing back to 
England her "dark freight, a vanished life,"^ and 
the poet's thoughts play lovingly about her in her 



1 Arthur Hallam died suddenly in Vienna, September 15, 1833; he 
was buried in Clevedon Church, which overlooks the Bristol Channel, 
January 3, 1834. 



A Spiritual Struggle 49 

voyage over placid seas. In fancy he sees her 
lights, and the sailor at the wheel; he hears the 
wash of the water, the sound of the bell in the 
night; he bids the winds be gentle and the waves 
be still. Quiet steals upon his spirit from these 
thoughts and fancies, and from meditations on 
the blessedness of burial in English church and 
churchyard— but it is the quiet of despair. In 
the silence of an autumnal morning, broken only 
by the sound of the ripening chestnut in its fall, 
while he muses upon the deep peace and calm of 
a wide landscape, he seems to find in all the 
quiet of the field and sky only the symbol of his 
own despair, only the suggestion of the deeper 
calm of death, of the 

dead calm in that noble breast 
Which heaves but with the heaving deep. 

A stormy evening comes, and his mood changes; 
the wind rises; it whirls the last red leaf from the 
tree; and the poet's spirit, stirred by the force 
of the tempest, exults in the strain and stir of the 
barren branches, and in "his wild unrest of woe'* 
he dotes and pores upon the laboring cloud that 

topples round the dreary west, 
A looming bastion fringed with fire. 

At length the ship reaches the harbor, and he 
blesses her for her kindly service. The storm of 



50 Tennyson 

his passion is again subdued, this time by the 
holy consolations of the ritual for the dead, and 
by the payment of the last tender offices of burial 
in English earth, where the violet of his native 
land may spring from the sacred dust. The 
poet muses upon the quiet churchyard by the 
Severn, where twice a day 

The salt sea-water passes by, 
And hushes half the babbling Wye, 
And makes a silence in the hills. 

To his imagination the river is like his grief that 
ebbs and flows — now silent when fullest, and again 
vocal as his deeper anguish falls, and he can speak 
a little. 

But again the theme changes, and the poet's 
mood. He meditates upon the broken friendship, 
so full of hope and song, and all the promise of 
the spring. Again in memory he treads the path- 
way from season to season until it sloped into 
the valley where sat "the Shadow fear'd of man," 
who wrapped his friend in darkness, and broke 
their fair companionship. Out of these reflec- 
tions at length, this bewilderment and pain, 
this wild grief and calm despair, which alternate 
as the theme of this first cycle of lyrics, while the 
poet is meditating upon the day of his delight and 
upon Love that made it so pure and perfect, the 
conviction asserts itself to his thought that Love 



A Spiritual Struggle 51 

is good, even though attended by sorrow — he 
feels it when he sorrows most: 

'Tis better to have loved and lost 
Than never to have loved at all. 

And with this conviction, in calm defiance of his 
early fears, the resolution declares itself to prove, 
in spite of all that fickle tongues may say and in 
scorn of the boast of the victor Hours, that 

No lapse of moons can conquer Love, 

II. THE QUESTIONING OF LOVE 

Now that the first bitterness of grief is thus 
allayed, the mind of the poet begins to project 
itself into the dark mystery of death, of sorrow 
and evil in the universe. Dim perplexity and 
eager question succeed the blank bewilderment 
and the successive gusts of passion that, as has 
been seen, mark the course of the first section of 
the poem. The first Christmas Eve approaches, 
moonless and enveloped in mist; they who mourn 
force themselves to keep the season for the sake 
of Use and Wont, "old sisters of a day gone by." 
But amid the pretense of joy and the mockery 
of games and garlands, there is ever present to 
their minds 

an awful sense 
Of one mute Shadow watching all. 

Little by little, as the songs of the sacred festival 
are sung, the hallowed implications of the faith 



52 Tennyson 

the season celebrates steal over the soul and light 
at length "the light that shone when Hope was 
born." With eager sympathy the imagination of 
the poet dwells upon the story of the Saviour 
at Bethany, and of the miracle wrought at the 
tomb of Lazarus: here, it seemed, in the long 
darkness of the centuries men stood on the very 
edge of dawn, as the simple villagers peered into 
the rock-hewn grave and saw it illuminated by a 
divine hope, by the light of a gracious personality — 

Behold a man raised up by Christ! 

What joy filled the household of the sisters when 
their brother was restored to them! — a joy that 
quite hid their sense of the mystery of that resur- 
rection. "All subtle thought, all curious fears" 
were borne down completely by the gladness of 
that restoration from the grave. 

A solemn gladness even crown'd 
The purple brows of Olivet. 

Mary simply believed, loved, worshiped, her 
earthly love being fixed in a higher, as her gaze 
roved from the living brother's face and rested on 
Him who was "the Life indeed." 

But while the poet's imagination thus dwells 
on the human aspects of the sacred narrative — 



A Spiritual Struggle 53 

on the love and joy of the sisters— his heart 
yearns to know its divine significance. If Lazarus 
had only told what it is to die! had only revealed 
where he was "those four days," or whether he 
heard his sister weeping over him and grieved for 
her! Alas, Lazarus never told it, and the mystery 
persists for after times. The miracle is doubted, 
and even the One who wrought it. The simplicity 
of trust of earlier days is gone; but while some 
may deem that, in refusing to fix their faith to 
form, they have reached a purer air and higher 
creed, the poet warns them not to disturb the 
faith of simpler folk, and declares sacred the 
"flesh and blood" to which they have linked a 
"truth divine." Yet he himself falls into the sad 
questionings of the age in which he lived. The 
awful doubt rises whether there be any life beyond 
the grave, or whether the stern creed be true that 
"no life lives forever." And as he stands thus 
amid the swirl of waters that rage around this 
dreadful alternative, there gradually emerges to 
his consciousness, through the finer intuitions of 
the soul, a spiritual assurance the validity of which 
his heart cannot gainsay, and which becomes the 
basis of his faith — 

That life shall live for evermore, 
Else earth is darkness at the core, 
And dust and ashes all that is. 



54 Tennyson 

With this assurance, also, rises another of equal 
import to the heart of grief, namely, that Love 
too is immortal, for 

If Death were seen 
At first as Death, Love had not been, 

or been "mere fellowship of sluggish moods," or 
the fierce and fickle passion of the brute. 

Now that these finer intuitions have vindicated 
their authority to his inner nature, the poet's 
thoughts revert again to that "comfort clasp'd in 
truth revealed," which, until it has thus been 
confirmed to the heart through the spiritual 
instincts, he has only dimly apprehended as a 
principle of faith. Certain at last of the immor- 
tality of Life and Love, he now sees in Christ a 
revelation of these dearest truths. Whatever 
may be the formal creed in which one seeks to 
embody the infinite and inexpressible truths of 
the soul,* this much the poet now holds certain: in 
the simple life of Jesus here on earth is a revelation 
of the Infinite transcending all other revelations 
that have been given to man, and a revelation 
that all men may read and understand; here is a 
figure that has made current, indeed, all the 



i"He disliked discussion on the nature of Christ, seeing that such 
discussion was mostly unprofitable, for 'none knoweth the Son but 
the Father.'" Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, vol. i, p. 251, 
note. 



A Spiritual Struggle 55 

mystical truths that man has found deep-seated 
in his nature. "And so," as the poet declares, 

the Word^ had breath, and wrought 
With human hands the creed of creeds 
In lovehness of perfect deeds, 
More strong than all poetic thought; 

Which he may read that binds the sheaf, 
Or builds the house, or digs the grave, 
And those wild eyes that watch the wave 

In roarings round the coral reef. 

"The spiritual character of Christ," he was accus- 
tomed to say, "is more wonderful than the greatest 
miracle." 

Even yet, however, the waters of the poet's 
grief have not altogether subsided. Though 
spring has come and kindled the yew with green 
at the tips, yet the thought of comfort perishes 
at the whispers that fall from the lips of sorrow. 
But as the season passes he begins to speculate 
upon the state of the dead and the relation of the 
living to those who have passed away. One by 
one, as the blind guesses of the philosophers 
suggest themselves to his mind, he draws from 
each whatever consolation it affords. When at 
length, however, the vague conjecture confronts 
him that the individual at death, "fusing all the 
skirts of self again," remerges in the general soul, 
and is lost forever in the fathomless sea of Being, 

^He explained "the Word" as used in the sense in which Saint 
John used it, as "the Revelation of the Eternal Thought of the Uni- 
verse." Cf. ibid., vol. i, p. 312, note. 



56 Tennyson 

his heart rises up to declare that so unsweet a 
faith can never yield the rest and freedom from 
discontent for which Love strives. So he rejects 
it utterly. For Love v^ill be satisfied, not merely 
by reunion vs^ith those v^ho have gone before, but 
by a reunion that brings w^ith it also recognition 
and recollection. One of the uses of life, he 
remarks, is to learn that "I" am "I," and "other 
than the things I touch," and this lesson once 
learned cannot so readily be forgotten. So in 
tones of great authority the spiritual instinct of 
the persistence of personality declares itself, and 
in the strong assurance of Love thus developed 
the poet proclaims his faith: 

Eternal form shall still divide 
The eternal soul from all beside; 
And I shall know him when we meet. 

Sublime as is the confidence to which the poet 
has by these processes attained, sublime as is his 
faith in the eternal persistence of individual life 
and consciousness and in the immortality of Love, 
there remains still one problem that perplexes and 
troubles him. It is the problem of the presence 
of evil in the universe. This is suggested to his 
mind by a sense of his own unfitness for the spirit- 
ual companionship with the dead for which he 
has prayed. Love bids him not to fret. 

That life is dash'd with flecks of sin. 



A Spiritual Struggle 57 

and that he cannot keep himself wholly true to 
the high ideal of character which he has set for 
himself. But when he contemplates the part 
that evil and sin play in the individual life, and 
reflects how manhood sometimes issues hale and 
green out of a youth of noise and folly, he feels 
himself put to ignorance again, though the inner 
voice still urges him to trust 



that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill, 
To pangs of nature, sins of will. 
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood; 



that there is a divine purpose in the lives of men, 
though the pattern cannot be seen for the knotted 
and tangled threads. 

But it is only a dim and feeble intuition at best 
with which Tennyson at first opposes the contra- 
dictions between the faith that there "shall never 
be one lost good" and the evil suggestions of 
nature. "Are God and Nature then at strife ?" 
he questions bitterly. And in answer there come 
to him only the words of a dark and hungry 
uncertainty: 

Behold, we know not anything; 

I can but trust that good shall fall 
At last — far off — at last, to all. 

And every winter change to spring. 



58 Tennyson 

So runs my dream: but what am I? 
An infant crying in the night : 
An infant crying for the Hght : 

And with no language but a cry. 

Thrust again into the darkness of despair by the 
thoughts of the ruthless processes of physical 
law, he "falters where he firmly trod," 

And falling with his weight of cares 
Upon the great world's altar-stairs 
That slope thro' darkness up to God, 

he stretches "lame hands of faith," and blindly 
gropes, and calling "to what he feels is Lord of 
all" he "faintly trusts the larger hope." Again 
the voice of Nature in sterner tones declares the 
fact of her indifference to the pain and suffering 
of a universe of sentient things, her wastefulness 
and the apparent purposelessness of her processes, 
her prodigality not of individual life alone but of 
whole types and species as well: 

I bring to life, I bring to death: 
The spirit does but mean the breath: 
I know no more, 

she says in sullen language. So the poet's feeble 
trust is shattered and reduced again to utter 
misgiving and despondency. He is beaten down 
by the sense of human frailty, of the futility of 
human life, the hollowness of human hopes — of 



A Spiritual Struggle 59 

the highest and holiest aspirations of the race. 
"What hope of answer, or redress ?'' he questions; 
but there is no response — it is hidden 

Behind the veil, behind the veiL 

But this mood of dark and hopeless uncertainty 
passes; other reflections follow, tending to a 
reawakening of the poet's assurance that Love 
abides through death, in spite of decay and the 
suggestions of the grave. There are meditations 
upon the possible relations the dead may sustain 
spiritually to the living, and other meditations 
upon the relation the poet himself, through mem- 
ory and spiritual communion, may in turn sus- 
tain to his lost friend — all of them issuing in 
the vision of the angel that touched the poet's 
crown of sorrow into leaf, into hope and a budding 
faith. The fair face of his friend smiles out upon 
him from his doubts and troubled fancies, and 
quiets all his fears; the past becomes the present 
and grief with its distress and misery is forgotten 
in holy memories. It is then, finally, under the 
sacred influences of Love that the dark questions 
of death and providence are merged into trust and 
confidence in the power and love of God. The 
anniversary of his day of sorrow breaks 

With blasts that blow the poplar white, 
And lash with storm the streaming pane. 



6o Tennyson 

But even while he muses upon his friend's untimely 
death and all the rich possibilities destroyed with 
him, upon the vanity of human fame amid the 
millions of worlds and thousands of years, he 
becomes assured in spirit that Nature is not a 
chaos of bhnd and conflicting forces, but a uni- 
verse of order, ruled by law, and thus grows 
content to resolve his fears and ignorance in the 
inscrutable wisdom of God from whom the law 
proceeds. Hence he declares at length, in words 
that mark this final resolution of the problem 
of evil through the spiritual intuition that God 
is good and is fulfilling a high and beneficent 
purpose in creation: 

I curse not nature, no, nor death; 
For nothing is that errs from law. 

What though each man's path becomes dim with 
weeds, and the sum of his life cannot be cast ? 
Man's task and man's reward may be left with 
Him to whom a thousand years are but as a day, 
and who sees the end from the beginning. 

What fame is left for human deeds 
In endless age? 

he asks; 

It rests with God. 

It is thus, after the tempest of his grief has been 
laid and the violent waves of his spiritual uncer- 



A Spiritual Struggle 6i 

tainty have subsided, that the poet is brought at 
last into the harbor of spiritual assurance. 

III. THE LOW BEGINNINGS OF CONTENT 

A still higher stage of spiritual attainment than 
that of the mere assurance of faith is reserved 
for the poet. It is found in the ethical enlarge- 
ment of life through human sympathy and fellow- 
ship, and in the service of humanity to which 
a genuine faith impels. It is this higher stage 
which is presented in the third and fourth sections 
of **In Memoriam" — in the third as a promise and 
a prophecy, and in the fourth as a splendid ful- 
fillment and a glorious triumph. 

In this sense the second Christmas, which 
came with frost and silent snow, and was attended 
by the warmth of Christmas cheer within and 
"the quiet sense of something lost," celebrated 
the beginning of a new departure in the spiritual 
history of the poet. For, secure at last in the faith 
that death is but an onward step in the eternal 
progress of the soul — a faith in which all his 
doubts found a complete resolution and which 
even reflections on the horrors of the grave and all 
**the lower life that earth's embrace may breed" 
could no longer disturb — he now turned toward 
the new year with a hopeful joy. Once he had 
scarcely desired to live until the coming of the 



62 Tennyson 

spring, but now he longed to quit the winter of his 
sorrow, and in season with the birds and blos- 
soms to 

burst a frozen bud 
And flood a fresher throat with song. 

Peace stole over his spirit as the quiet airs, sweet 
with the showers and budding freshness of early 
spring, rolled from the glowing west at evening, 
fanned the fever from his blood, and drove far oflF 
the specters of Death and Doubt. Once more he 
sauntered about the sacred places of Cambridge 
and "felt the same, but not the same"; he 
stood again before the door of Arthur's room, 
where so often his voice had mingled with the 
voices of his youthful contemporaries in talk and 
song, and quick debate; and through the sweet 
ministrations of memory he seemed to beget again 
that 'Mawn-golden" time. Once more his foot- 
steps loitered among the quiet paths and upland 
walks of Somersby, where he had lingered with 
his friend in a kindlier past; he heard as of old 
"the sweep of scythe in morning dew,'' or, "brush- 
ing ankle-deep in flowers," he heard 

behind the woodbine veil, 
The milk that bubbled in the pail, 
And buzzings of the honeyed hours. 

Soothed by these recollections of the past and 
by all the tender associations of these sacred 
haunts, he longed again for a renewal through 



A Spiritual Struggle 63 

spiritual communion of the companionship that 
death had broken. And so at length one quiet 
night in summer, when the tapers burned unwaver- 
ing on the lawn and not a sound broke the silence 
to him as he read again and again the letters 
his friend had written in other days, there came 
the blessed realization of a spiritual presence; all 
at once it seemed as if the dead man touched him 
out of the past; the living soul^ was flashed on 
his; and he was caught up among the great cos- 
mic forces and 

whirl'd 
About empyreal heights of thought, 
And came on that which is, and caught 
The deep pulsations of the world, 

iEonian music measuring out 

The steps of Time — the shocks of Chance — 
The blows of Death. 

At length his trance was canceled, "stricken thro' 
with doubt" as the pale glimmerings of dawn 
gradually "broadened into boundless day." And 
though the poet feels that he cannot express in 
"matter-molded forms of speech" all that this 
mystic experience meant to him, yet in the abso- 
lute reality which this communion of spirit with 
spirit, ghost with ghost, assumed to his con- 
sciousness lies the very root and center of the 

i"The living soul — perchance of the Deity . . . I've often 
had a strange feeling of being wound and wrapped in the Great 
Soul." Tennyson, in comment on this passage, to James Knowles, 
as reported in the Nineteenth Century, vol. ^;i, p. i86. 



64 Tennyson 

religious philosophy of "In Memoriam," the 
strongest confirmation, also, of the validity of 
those spiritual intuitions out of which in the 
earlier stages of his grief and doubt his faith had 
so hardly developed. Indeed, in such states of 
mystical consciousness as this are found the root 
and center of Tennyson's philosophy of the reality 
of the unseen, and of the spiritual as opposed to 
the materialistic synthesis. 

The return of the day of Arthur's death, in the 
course of the seasons, does not now ruffle the 
poet's calm, though it brings with it melancholy 
memories, and a feeling of sympathy with them 
who, like him, keep the day sacred to those who 
have gone before. Unlike the first anniversary, 
which came with wind and rain and all the accom- 
paniments of spiritual tempest as well, this day 
is peaceful and glad with the singing of birds, 
the lowing of cattle, and songs that slighted the 
coming care of autumn. Everywhere, as the 
poet climbed the loved hillsides about the home 
of his boyhood, the landscape "breathed some 
gracious memory of his friend." But the time 
has now come when he must leave forever all the 
dear familiar places of Somersby— the garden, the 
brook, and the windy grove. ^ It is bitter to think 
that through the years to come they shall all 

^The Tennysons removed from, the rectory in Somersby in 1837. 



A Spiritual Struggle 65 

be unwatched and uncared for until they slowly 
grow into the affections of stranger children, while 
from the countryside his memory fades away. 

On the last night, however, before he went 
*Trom out the doors where he was bred," he 
dreamed a dream that cheered him with the 
prophecy of a fuller minstrelsy and the promise 
of a glorious hope. He dreamed he dwelt with 
maidens — and they seem to represent the poetic 
powers and talents— in a hall far up among the 
hills of youth, where flowed a river fed with waters 
from hidden summits. About a veiled statue, the 
shape of which was the shape of the man he 
loved, they sang with harp and carol of what 
**is wise and good and graceful." But when a 
summons came from the sea he dreamed he left 
his early home, and going to the river sailed away 
"by many a level mead, and shadowing bluff"; 
and as the shores grew vaster and the flood 
rolled in grander space it seemed his maidens 
gathered strength and lordlier presence; in his 
limbs, likewise, he "felt the thews of Anakim, 
the pulses of a Titan's heart." And as they 
neared the sea, he dreamed, the songs of the 
maidens grew nobler. 

As one would sing the death of war, 
And one would chant the history 
Of that great race, which is to be, 

And one the shaping of a star. 



66 Tennyson 

So, coming at length to the deep, where "the 
forward-creeping tides began to foam" and where 
he saw "a great ship Hft her shining sides," and 
on the deck the man he loved grown "thrice as 
large as man," he climbed upon her, and in the 
companionship of his friend and his maidens he 
sailed away 

toward a crimson cloud 
That landlike slept along the deep. 

It is a vision of the poet's past and its songs 
of a self-regarding grief; a mystic prophecy of his 
future and of the songs he is destined to sing, of 
the hopes of science and the greater race that is 
to be, until life closes in reunion with that friend 
who to him is the promise of the perfect man of 
the future. 

IV. THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE 

In the mystic vision with which the third section 
of "In Memoriam" closes, as has been said, is 
found the suggestion of the main dramatic theme 
of the fourth and last cycle of lyrics, and the 
promise of the final triumph of Love in the 
security of faith, in the joy of human sympathy, 
and the service of men. The third Christmas 
marks the dawn of a new era of spiritual history. 
For the season is kept no longer with dance and 
revel as of old, but with silence and holy memo- 
ries, in a strange country and among unfamiliar 



A Spiritual Struggle 67 

scenes that seem to rob it of half its sanctity. 
The past is gone; and the poet feels that the 
unresting processes of nature, the unhasting 
round of the seasons, will run out their measured 
arcs and "lead the closing cycle rich in good." 
It is with this feeling that he utters his jubilant 
call of greeting to the New Year, when he bids the 
bells of midnight to ring out his personal cares, 
his mournful rhymes, and all 

the grief that saps the mind, 
For those that here we see no more; 

to ring in the "fuller minstrel," who by his songs 
is to help bring in the better civilization; to ring 
out the false, and all the evils of the age — social 
strife, slander and spite, the lust of gold, false 
pride in place and blood, "old shapes of foul 
disease" and all the thousand wars of the past; 
to ring in the love of truth and right, the common 
love of good; to ring in the nobler modes of life, 
with sweeter manners and purer laws; to 

Ring in the vaHant man and free, 

The larger heart, the kindher hand; 
Ring out the darkness of the land, 

Ring in the Christ that is to be.^ 

i"He said that the forms of the Christian religion would alter, but 
that the spirit of Christ would grow from more to more 'in the roll 
of the ages,' 

Till each man find his own in all men's good, 

And all raen work in noble brotherhood. 
'This is one of my meanings,' he said, 'of 

Ring in the Christ that is to be.' " 
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, vol. i, p. 326 



68 Tennyson 

How completely Tennyson fulfilled this noble 
program and became indeed to his age the "fuller 
minstrel" — the full-voiced singer of the new 
humanitarianism of the day, of the sacred affec- 
tions of the human heart out of which so much 
morality springs, of the eternal humanities that 
make the humblest conditions of life holy, of the 
conscience and the conduct of life, and of the 
ways of the soul — all of his poetry written after 
the period to which this lyric belongs abundantly 
shows. 

In the enthusiasm of this purpose and in the 
certitude of faith that grows out of the practice 
of its precepts, the poet keeps with cheer and 
song the anniversary of Arthur's birth — a day 
of bitter cold, and ice, and fierce north winds. 
He meditates upon the character of Hallam, the 
ideal gentleman, great in knowledge, in reverence, 
and in charity. With the coming of spring all 
his doubts have vanished forever. He contem- 
plates a second time the record of creation, which 
once had put him to a stern sense of human 
ignorance and of the feebleness of human confi- 
dence in the ultimate issue of good from evil.* 
But now he sees a vital law of progress underlying 
the facts of nature, and explaining her appar- 
ent wastefulness and cruelty; with a sudden leap 

»Cf. p. 58, and lyrics LIV-LVI. 



A Spiritual Struggle 69 

of the spirit he comes to read beneath the vicis- 
situdes of human history the same law resolving 
also the awful perplexities that arise from the 
spectacle of sin and suffering in human life. Man 
to-day with his beastly passions and the weak- 
ness of his moral and spiritual nature is but "the 
herald of a higher race" that is to come in the 
fulfillment of time, as well as of the higher possi- 
bilities to which each individual of the human 
family may in his own character attain, 

If so he type this work of time 
Within himself from more to more. 

It is his high destiny, both as a race and individ- 
ually, through gloom, and burning fears, and 
hissing tears, and "battered with the shocks 
of doom," to 

arise and fly 
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; 
Move upward, working out the beast, 
And let the ape and tiger die. 

Thus in the unity of the evolutionary process 
through the conflict of the great cosmic forces, 
through the battle of the higher forms of life 
for supremacy over the lower, through the more 
sublime conflict of the moral and spiritual nature 
over the beastly instincts of the race, the poet 
resolves once for all his perplexities of mind and 
trouble of spirit. Let others, if they will, accept 



70 Tennyson 

the materialistic synthesis; he, for his part, hav- 
ing fought with death as Paul with beasts, can 
never surrender himself to its sad and bitter 
implications — for he "was born to other things/' 
Thoughts of the transiency of the material 
universe, of how all things are in process of 
change and decay; of how the very hills are 
shadows, the solid lands like clouds melting 
away; of how to-day the silence of the sea is on 
the place where in other times the noisy streets 
of cities roared to the tread of human feet, no 
longer shake his confidence in the eternity of 
spirit and the immortality of Love. Even before 
the mysterious play of the mighty forces in human 
history, the warpings past the aim of human 
purposes, the turmoil of changing creeds and 
vanishing institutions, the crash of great aeons 
passing away in blood, and the noise of the peoples 
in their blind gropings after a higher order, no 
longer appall him; for above the storm he hears 
the voice of Love, in tones of great authority, 
declare that "all is well," and that behind the 
complex web of aspirations and human achieve- 
ment all things are working together for good 
according to the infinite wisdom of God. 

And this faith, he declares, that thus reads 
with confidence "the course of human things," is 
one with the faith that fought with death and 



A Spiritual Struggle 71 

conquered the fear of the grave. It is the same 
faith, too, that finds God immanent in Stardust 
and blossom and in the course of human history, 
that finds the soul one with God in a mysterious 
union beyond the power of words to express. 
Fittingly, therefore, the poem concludes with a 
solemn invocation to that "living will"^ which 
endures when all things else pass away and is one 
with the higher and enduring part of man, a prayer 
that our deeds — for here the poet speaks for the 
race as well as himself — may be purified, and 

That we may lift from out of dust 
A voice as unto him that hears, 
A cry above the conquer' d years, 

To one that with us works, and trust, 

With faith that comes of self-control, 

The truths that never can be proved 
Until we close with all we loved, 

And all we flow from, soul in soul. 

It is readily apparent, then, from this survey 
of the processes through which his faith developed, 
that in "these brief lays of Sorrow born" Tenny- 
son did not presume to sound the depths of 
philosophy, or to pierce with certain vision the 
mysteries of mortal destiny. It was not for him, 

^"'O living will that shalt endure' he explained as that which we 
know as free will, the higher and enduring part of man. He held that 
there was an intimate connection between the human and divine, 
and that each individual will had a spiritual and eternal significance 
with relation to other individual wills as well as to the vSupreme and 
Eternal WilL" Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, vol. i, p. 319. 



72 Tennyson 

as he declares, to "trust the larger lay," but 
rather to loosen 

from the lip 
Short swallow-flights of song, that dip 
Their wings in tears, and skim away. 

An orderly development of the philosophy of 
faith by the cold processes of logic, therefore, 
"In Memoriam" has not — in the nature of poetry 
cannot have, even if the conditions of its compo- 
sition did not preclude it. Tennyson does not 
propose in the poem any formal solution for 
the doubts that distressed him and the uncer- 
tainties that obscured his spiritual vision. Not 
through science or philosophy did he come into 
the knowledge of Him w^hose ways are past 
finding out; but through the voice of the spiritual" 
instincts, through experience, beside the reali- 
ties of which science and philosophy are empty 
phantoms. The poem is, indeed, a record of 
those processes, simple and subjective, whereby 
the poet's faith, not too boldly or confidently 
but with true humility, asserted itself to his 
consciousness, the processes whereby he passed 
from darkness to light, from fear to faith, from 
doubt to spiritual certitude and trust. 

That which we dare invoke to bless; 

Our dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt; 

He, They, One, All; within, without; 
The Power in darkness whom we guess ; 



A Spiritual Struggle 73 

I found Him not in world or sun, 

Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye; 

Nor thro' the questions men may try. 
The petty cobwebs we have spun : 

If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep, 

I heard a voice, "Believe no more," 
And heard an ever-breaking shore 

That tumbled in the Godless deep ; 

A warmth within the breast would melt 
The freezing reason's colder part, 
And like a man in wrath the heart 

Stood up and answer'd, "I have felt." 

No, like a child in doubt and fear: 

But that blind clamor made me wise; 
Then was I as a child that cries, 

But, crying, knows his father near;^ 

And what I am beheld again 

What is, and no man imderstands; 
And out of darkness came the hands 

That reach thro' nature, molding men. 

And these processes by which "the larger hope" 
justified itself to the poet's heart and soul, and 
vindicated its unfailing validity, are the processes 
by which "the truths that never can be proved" 
in the history of the race have generally revealed 
themselves to the consciousness of men — herein, 
indeed, lies one element of the universaHty of 
the poem. Moreover, catching up the convergent 
tendencies of t he time in science and religion,^ 

^Cf. lyric LIV. as quoted on p. 58, 

2An interesting confirmation of the adequacy of Tennyson's method 
of meeting the peculiar religious difficulties of the time, as affected by 
contemporary scientific thought, is found in Romanes's Thoughts on 
Religion (1894). Many sections read like logical commentaries in 
prose on the position assumed in the various lyrics of "In Memoriam." 



74 Tennyson 

and bringing them together, through a profound 
personal experience, in the interpretation of 
spiritual truth, Tennyson in "In Memoriam" 
became the voice of the age in its ghasthest doubts 
and divinest hopes. " 'I,' " he said in connection 
with the poem, "is not always the poet speaking 
of himself, but the voice of the human race 
speaking thro' him."^ Hence it is that for 
the mood of troubled doubt that, as has already 
been pointed out, harassed so many of the noblest 
minds of the day, "In Memoriam" offered an 
alleviation so rich and satisfying. It was no 
mere sentiment that prompted the throng in 
the Abbey, when the body of the great Laureate 
was committed to the dust, to read while waiting 
for the funeral train the exquisite lyrics of this 
noble elegy;^ it was the spontaneous appeal of a 
people, in the presence of a great national sorrow, 
to that wonderful series of poems in which their 
dead prophet, in voicing his own, had likewise 
voiced for them all their dull anxieties and vague 
perplexities of an earlier day, and the comfort 
they, with him and by processes similar to his 
own, had come to find "clasp'd in truth revealed." 
That Life is eternal, that Love is eternal, that 
individual personality persists forever; that God 



1 Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, vol, i, p. 305. 
2Cf. ibid., vol. ii, p. 430, note. 



A Spiritual Struggle 75 

is good, that in Him we live, and move and have 
our being, and that together w^ith Him mankind 
is working toward that 

one far-off divine event 
To which the whole creation moves; 

and that, finally, in Christ is found the full reve- 
lation in the flesh of what Tennyson calls the 
Eternal Thought of the Universe — these are the 
cardinal principles of his thought and faith. 
And in the Invocation, written in 1849, to sum 
up all his struggle and its results in terms of 
faith, the poet has himself described them and 
the spirit in which he held them: 

Strong Son of'God, immortal Love, 

Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 
By faith, and faith alone, embrace, 

Believing where we cannot prove ;^ 

Thine are these orbs of light and shade ; 

Thou madest Life in man and brute ; 

Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot 
Is on the skull which thou hast made. 

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust : 

Thou madest man, he knows not why, 
He thinks he was not made to die; 

And thou hast made him : thou art just. 

Thou seemest human and divine, 

The highest, holiest manhood, thou: 
Our wills are ours, we know not how; 

Our wills are ours, to make them thine. 



i"To inquiries as to the meaning of the words 'immortal Love' 
... he explained that he had used ' Love ' in the same sense 
as Saint John (John, chap, iv)." Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, 
vol. i, p. 312, note. 



76 Tennyson 

Our little systems have their day; 

They have their day and cease to be: 
They are but broken lights of thee, 

And thou, O Lord, art more than they. 

We have but faith : we cannot know ; 

For knowledge is of things we see ; 

And yet we trust it comes from thee, 
A beam in darkness : let it grow. 

Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
But more of reverence in us dwell; 
That mind and soul, according well, 

May make one music as before, 

But vaster. We are fools and slight; 
We mock thee when we do not fear: 
But help thy foolish ones to bear; 

Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light. 



CHAPTER III 

THE ANSWER TO MATERIALISM 

Not long after the publication of "In Memo- 
riam'* in 1850 the great controversy of the century 
began between science and religion, and Tenny- 
son was put to the defense of his faith against 
the implications of the materialistic synthesis. 
Not that he ever had to fight to hold the faith 
he had so hardly won in his long battle with 
doubt; or that he ever became a polemic and 
entered the lists of controversy and debate in 
defense of it — Tennyson was always too much 
of a poet to make his art the instrument of 
intellectual warfare. But if at times faith seemed 
to suffer a temporary obscuration behind the 
mists of scientific materialism, if ever old doubts 
and fears aroused themselves under the encour- 
agement of a newly expressed and imperfectly 
understood scientific theory, he found escape 
from them and was restored to clearness of 
spiritual vision again through the restatement 
of those principles that had assured their validity 
to his consciousness in the dark experiences of 
his earlier conflict, that had established them- 
selves by the irrefutable logic of a profound 

77 



78 Tennyson 

personal experience. And more than this, his 
faith grew in confidence and certitude, as it 
developed in scope and reach, by the mere pro- 
cess of restatement. 

It was under such circumstances that during 
the years between 1865 and 1885, when the con- 
troversy was at its height, Tennyson wrote a 
number of poems in which his emotional and 
imaginative response to the varying conditions 
of the religious unrest and disheartenment of 
the times found utterance. Some of these were 
highly speculative and led the poet far afield in 
the regions of metaphysics; but most of them 
presented in the imperishable and eternal forms 
of beauty those truths that are felt and thought 
but cannot be seen or proved, and which conse- 
quently find their most adequate utterance, not 
in creed and formal statement, but in the free 
and unlimited creations of the poetic imagination. 
In 1869 in particular was published the volume 
of "The Holy Grail, and Other Poems," in which 
is found Tennyson's most exquisite and suggestive 
presentation of his strong belief in the reality of 
the unseen — which, as has been said, lies at the 
very root and center of his spiritual philosophy — 
as well as his most effective protest in art against 
the growing influences of the antagonistic system 
of thought. It was in this volume that he gave 



The Answer to Materialism 79 

to the "Idylls of the King" — notably in "The 
Holy Grail" and "The Coming of Arthur"— that 
profound moral and spiritual significance that 
constitutes the secret of so much of their real 
charm. But of this spiritual beauty that glows 
beneath almost every incident and situation of 
the "Idylls," and of its relation to Tennyson's 
religious philosophy as a whole, it remains to 
speak in a subsequent chapter. In this our 
interest lies in the main with those shorter poems, 
most of them lyric, in which he has opposed to 
the materialistic negations, and whatsoever they 
imply, a luminous and artistically effective expres- 
sion of the fundamental principles of his faith. 

These poems fall into several clearly defined 
groups. With the advance of physiological science 
during the period under consideration, there 
developed in some quarters a naked and cynical 
temper of mind that was hostile to all belief in 
whatever is not ultimately reducible to a fact of 
sense perception — a temper of which the youth 
"worn from wasteful living" in "The Ancient 
Sage" is a type. Against this, though in no con- 
troversial way, Tennyson stoutly maintained his 
belief in the reality and eternity of spirit, and in 
the essentially spiritual grounds of the universe. 
And a number of poems were written in which he 
has given utterance to this faith. Moreover, at 



8o Tennyson 

this time, Darwin's theory of evolution was 
prominent in men's minds, and inferences which 
Tennyson deemed unwarrantable were drawn 
from it. In particular the view of Darwin that 
conscience and emotion are part of man's inheri- 
tance from his brute ancestry aroused a swarm 
of perplexing problems which pressed for solution 
anew in accordance with the enlarging knowledge 
of the age. For example, this view became the 
stronghold of the argument of the day against 
belief in the immortality of the soul — a belief 
that Tennyson regarded as the cardinal point of 
Christianity. There are consequently several 
poems of this period in which he has sought to 
enforce his faith in the life after death, not in- 
deed by attempting to meet the arguments of the 
materialist — that would have been a prostitution 
of his art — but by presenting in terms of feeling 
and under the forms of the poetic imagination 
his strong conviction that only in the light of a 
possible future life can the contradictions and 
disappointments of this be recompensed and 
reconciled. The cognate question, also, of the 
meaning of virtue and truth, and of the signifi- 
cance to man of devotion to a high and noble 
purpose, if like his mute brother of the field and 
forest he is merely the unhappy creature of a day, 
and passes at death into a dreamless and ever- 



The Answer to Materialism 8i 

lasting sleep; the question of the mystery of pain 
in the world of nature and man, of sin in human 
life, of the contradictions of history and the 
apparent tendency of the individual as of the race 
to slip backward at times into barbarism, in 
seeming denial of the existence of a benevolent, 
an all-wise, and all-powerful creator; his vigorous 
feeling likewise of the blighting effects upon char- 
acter of the implications of materialism when 
they are made a rule of conduct, of the ghastliness 
of its negation of God and the soul, and of the 
hideousness of its failure to satisfy the spiritual 
wants, and aspirations, and convictions of men — 
all these themes became the subject of his con- 
cern and the burden of much of his poetry during 
these years. 

Among the poems of this period in which 
Tennyson has clothed his dominant philosophical 
idealism in forms of greatest beauty and power 
are three of special significance in this connection 
— *The Voice and the Peak," which was first 
pubHshed in 1874, "The Higher Pantheism," a 
poem contributed to the first meeting after its 
organization of the Metaphysical Society^ in 

^Founded in April, 1869, by Tennyson and others, for a free inter- 
change of views between those who were ranged on the side of faith 
and those who were on the side of unfaith. Among the earliest 
members were Dean Stanley, Gladstone, Huxley, Hutton, Froude, 
Ward, Tyndall, Knowles, Frederic Harrison, Lubbock, Henry Sidg- 
wick, and Mark Pattison. See Memoir, vol. ii, pp. 165-172, 



82 Tennyson 

June, 1869, and published the same year, and the 
familiar lines, "Flower in the Crannied Wall," 
which were also published in the "Holy Grail" 
volume. Linked together by similarity of theme, 
they yet unfold varying aspects and intimations 
of the poet's thought that the only reality is 
spirit, that the whole material universe is only 
"a divine energizing under the forms of space and 
time," and that God is immanent in all forms of 
nature and life — God flowing through all, upbear- 
ing all, and giving to everything that is a secret 
and divine essence. "If God were to withdraw 
himself for a single instant from the universe," 
he was accustomed to say in this connection, 
"everything would vanish into nothingness." In 
presenting such a view as this Tennyson was, of 
course, in conflict with the conventional concep- 
tion of God then current, which he has described 
as that of "an immaculate clergyman in a white 
tie," and which Teufelsdrockh has also described 
as that of "an absentee God, sitting idle, ever 
since the first Sabbath, at the oustide of his 
universe, and seeing it go." But he was not only 
in conflict with this mechanical notion of the 
universe and its implications of a "carpenter 
God"; he was in conflict as well with that scien- 
tific temper of mind which refused belief in every- 
thing that lies beyond the range of the senses. 



The Answer to Materialism 83 

And herein lies a significant service that Tennyson 
rendered his age: by giving imaginative utterance 
to his sublime conception of the Divine and 
Eternal, he opened the way, almost before its 
philosophers and priests had found it, for the 
reconciliation between the conclusions of science 
concerning the processes of creation in a growing 
and living universe, and the intuitions of the 
heart concerning the reality of spirit and the 
Personality of God, which is the realization of 
the present age. 

In "The Voice and the Peak'* the poet has 
given expression with striking vividness of emo- 
tional effect, and in imagery appropriately sublime 
and beautiful, to his profound feeling that the 
material is in reality the transient, and that the 
spiritual is the only real and abiding principle 
of the universe. All night he has heard the 
voice of the sea 

Rave over the rocky bar; 
all night he has watched the silent peak and the 
star gliding in the quiet heaven above it. "Hast 
thou no voice, O Peak .?" he asks at length; and 
the voice he has heard replies, 

"I am the voice of the Peak, 
I roar and rave, for I fall." 

That Is the teaching of nature, the insistent utter- 
ance of peak and valley, of sea and star — that 



84 Tennyson 

nothing endures, that all things run through their 
cycle and suflFer their doom, that the outward 
world waxes old and vanishes away like smoke 
and is seen no more. But here in answer the 
heart of the poet speaks out his strong conviction 
that beyond the world of sense is a world that 
does not change or fade, a world that abides 
forever. 

The Peak is high and flush'd 

At his highest with sunset fire; 
The Peak is high, and the stars are high, 

But the thought of a man is higher. 

A deep below the deep, 

And a height beyond the height! 
Our hearing is not hearing, 

And our seeing is not sight. 

This, also, is one of the suggestions of "The 
Higher Pantheism" — a poem which, considering 
the circumstances of its first publication before 
the Metaphysical Society, may fairly be taken 
as intended to represent the full significance of 
Tennyson's idealistic philosophy, and yet a poem 
at once so profound in its utterance of truth and 
so concrete and imaginative in form that it is 
difficult of interpretation without a sacrifice of 
one or the other of its elements of beauty. Here 
again he has declared his belief that the things 
that are seen are but illusions that hide, or at 
best dimly represent, the things that are unseen 



The Answer to Materialism 85 

and eternal. "Are not," he asks, "the forms of 
the material universe — the sun, the moon, the 
stars, the hills, and the seas — merely the manifes- 
tations of that infinite, and inscrutable, and 
ineffable life of things, *the Vision of Him who 
reigns : 
Is not the Vision He? tho' He be not that which He seems? 

It is as though Tennyson were here adapting to the 
conditions of knowledge of a later day the saying 
of Paul in an earlier and simpler age, that "the 
invisible things of Him from before the creation 
of the world are clearly seen, being understood 
by the things that are made." But that man 
cannot read them fully, that he sees only dimly 
and in part, is, in Tennyson's conception, the 
natural consequence of the finite and earthly 
limitations in which he is placed, as also "this 
weight of body and limb," and the forms of sky 
and earth are likewise "the sign and symbol" of 
man's "division from Him." 

Dark is the world to thee: thyself art the reason why. 

And yet, though with the finite eye man cannot 
behold him, but only with the eye of faith, that 
God is, and that he is infinitely beyond any con- 
ception we can frame or any manifestation that 
we may see, and that every human heart may 
come into personal communion with Him the 



86 Tennyson 

most intimate and vital, Tennyson holds as 
certain: 

Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit 

can meet — 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and 

feet. 

This to the poet is the greatest and surest fact of 
human experience, as God and the Soul, each a 
true personality and yet the two one in a mystic 
and unfathomable unity, are the great and only 
realities of the universe. Men have attempted to 
express the mystery or to deny it, to define God, 
to say what he is. The wise have declared that he 
is law — and the poet bids us accordingly rejoice, 

For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet His voice. 

Others in the language and spirit of the new 

science have reduced him to an abstraction and 

declared Law to be God, and still others have 

declared there is no God at all. And it is not 

strange, the poet thinks, that men should thus 

differ in their views of the Infinite, considering 

the limitations under which they must do their 

thinking: 

For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool. 
For the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see ; 
But if we could see and hear, this Vision — were it not He? 

And again in the lines "Flower in the Crannied 
Wall" he expresses in earnest and impressive 



The Answer to Materialism 87 

words his sense of the essential unity of the world 
in an unattainable and secret essence which is 
hidden away below the show of things and in 
which all forms of nature, the little as well as the 
great, must share: 

Flower in the crannied wall, 

I pluck you out of the crannies, 

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 

Little flower — but if I could understand 

What you are, root and all, and all in all, 

I should know what God and man is. 

Let not the poet, however, be misread or mis- 
understood in his view that God is unknowable 
in "his whole world-self and all-in-all": his is 
not the agnosticism of Huxley, which has been 
described as "an attitude of reasoned ignorance 
touching everything that lies beyond the sphere 
of sense-perception — a professed inability to found 
faith on any other basis"; neither is it the agnosti- 
cism, so-called, of Herbert Spencer in his doctrine 
of the Unknowable as described by Romanes — 
that if there be a God he cannot reveal himself to 
man. It is rather what might be called the higher 
agnosticism of Saint Paul, who said, "Now we 
see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: 
now I know in part; but then shall I know even 
as also I am known." It is that philosophical 
and Christian attitude of mind which, recogniz- 
ing all the limitations of sense and the finite con- 



88 Tennyson 

ditions of human thinking, and recognizing that 
the finite can by no means comprehend the Infinite, 
does nevertheless through the heart and the higher 
intuitions of our nature continually seek and find, 
and is ever conscious of the reality of that Divine 
and Eternal from whom we come, as the Soul is 
ever conscious of itself. **Who knows," he was 
accustomed to ask, "whether Revelation be not 
itself a veil to hide the glory of that Love which 
we could not look upon, without marring the 
sight and our onward progress ?" 

There is another poem, however, somewhat 
more speculative than these, but in the main 
sublime and imaginatively mystical, in which 
Tennyson has pushed his speculations concerning 
the nature of God and the Soul and their mutual 
relationship into the very abysses of philosophical 
abstraction, and then raised them into the field 
of poetry by the power of a profound emotion. 
Under the significant title of "De Profundis" 
appear "The Two Greetings," written on the 
birth of his eldest son in 1852 and suggested 
by his reflections at that time, and "The Human 
Cry," written at the request of Jowett for an 
anthem on God for Balliol Chapel. The first 
of the two greetings is scarcely more than a 
noble and stately salutation to his child. 
Breaking with laughter from the dark, 



The Answer to Materialism 89 

and a beautiful prayer for a happy life, a peaceful 
old age, and a placid death. But the second 
greeting is a profound speculation, touched with 
beauty of imagery and intensity of emotion, con- 
cerning the source of the Soul in that mystic sea 
of Being, and how it drew from out the deep, 
coming 

From that true world within the world we see, 
Whereof our world is but the bounding shore ; ' 

and all the story of its earthly course and its high 
eternal destiny. 

For in the world, which is not ours, They said, 
"Let us make man," and that which should be man, 
From that one light no man can look upon, 
Drew to this shore lit by the suns and moons 
And all the shadows. 

It is half-lost in its own shadow and its fleshly 
sign of personal existence; it wails being born, for 
birth is banishment into mystery,^ and into the 
pain of finite conditions, which after all are but 

our mortal veil 
And shatter'd phantom of that Infinite One. 

Its destiny is to live and choose the issues of life, 
inconceivably free^ and undetermined, and inalien- 
ably a person, — 

^"The real mysteries to him were Time, life, and 'finite-infinite* 
space: and so he talks of the soul 'being born and banished into 
mystery.'" See Memoir, vol. i, p. 316, note. 

2" Free will was undoubtedly, he said, the 'main-miracle, appar- 
ently an act of self-limitation by the Infinite, and yet a revelation by 
Himself to Himself.'" See Memoir, vol. i, pp. 316, 317. 



90 Tennyson 

and still depart 
From death to death thro' life and life,^ and find 
Nearer and ever nearer Him, who wrought 
Not Matter, nor the finite-infinite, 
But this main-miracle, that thou art thou. 
With power on thine own act and on the world. 

On the other hand, as touching the nature of 
God and his quaHties and attributes, Tennyson 
was always slow to speak. "I dare hardly name 
His name," he would say, and accordingly in 
"The Ancient Sage" he refers to Him as "the 
Nameless." But he had a profound sense of 
human dependence upon Him, which he expresses 
in the last section of "De Profundis," to which 
he has given the title of "The Human Ciy." 
Here, after seeking an abstract and philosophical 
expression of his conception of God as "Infinite 
Ideality, Immeasurable Reality, Infinite Person- 
ality,^ Hallowed and Ever to be Praised," he 

^It seems to have been Tennyson's view, expressed in a number 
of his poems, that "personaHty established here, moves onward self- 
conscious and with full memory in the world to come." Cf. for 
example, "In Memoriam," lyric LXXXII: 

Eternal process moving on, 
From state to state the spirit walks. 

2" He would allow that God is unknowable in ' his whole world-self 
and all-in-all, ' and therefore that there was some force in the objec- 
tion made by some people to the word ' Personality,' as being ' anthro- 
pomorphic,' and that perhaps 'Self-consciousness' or 'Mind' might 
be clearer to them: but at the same time he insisted that, although 
'man is like a thing of naught' in 'the boundless plan,' our highest 
view of God must be more or less anthropomorphic : and that ' Person- 
ality,' as far as our intelligence goes, is the widest definition and 
includes 'Mind,' 'Self-consciousness,' 'Will,' 'Love,' and other attri- 
butes of the Real, the Supreme, 'the High and Lofty One that 
inhabiteth Eternity whose name is Holy.'" See Memoir, vol. i, 
pp. 311,312. 



The Answer to Materialism 91 

concludes In lines that glow with reverence and 
humility of spirit: 

We feel we are nothing — for all is Thou and in Thee ; 
We feel we are something — that also has come from Thee; 
We know we are nothing — but Thou wilt help us to be. 
Hallowed be Thy name — Hallekiiah ! 

Another aspect of the religious controversy of 
the period, however, awakened in the heart of the 
poet an even greater imaginative and emotional 
reaction than that which centered about the 
denial of the reality of spirit. It was that which 
attended the inferences drawn by the evolutionary 
philosophy from Darwin's view of conscience and 
emotion as merely man's inheritance from his 
brute ancestry. This controversy, as has been 
said, had many phases, a principal one to the 
mind of Tennyson being that concerning the 
immortality of the soul and the problems of the 
purpose and significance of life in the materialis- 
tic conception consequent upon the denial of a fu- 
ture life to man. It has already appeared in the 
chapter on "In Memoriam" how firmly the poet 
clung to the instinct of immortality as at least a 
strong indication that another life awaits the 
mortal here below. "If you allow a God," he 
said, "and God allows this strong instinct for 
another life, surely that In a measure is a presump- 
tion of its truth. We cannot give up the mighty 



92 Tennyson 

hopes that make us men." But, having found 
hidden away in the deep recesses of his nature 
these intimations of immortahty, Tennyson did 
not, as has been seen, rest his faith upon them 
alone. Another and even more imperative con- 
viction grew upon his consciousness in the course 
of his early struggle with doubt — that only in the 
light of the continuous progress of the soul in 
a higher and better world, is its existence under 
the finite conditions and limitations of this saved 
from becoming a parody upon its possibilities. In 
several of the lyrics of "In Memoriam" — notably 
XXXIV, XXXV, and LVI— he declared in effect 
that if nature, as seems to be the implication of the 
materialistic philosophy, really sets no value upon 
the higher spiritual achievements of man, counts 
as of no worth his love of truth and justice, ignores 
his trust that God is love "and love Creation's 
final law," and thrusts aside his psalms of praise 
and fanes of prayer, then indeed is life a hideous 
and futile self-contradiction. Only in the light of 
a future life could Tennyson find the worth of this: 
immortality was to him necessary to account for 
and explain the contradictions written over the 
face of our mortal state. 

And this became the sure ground of his faith in 
the days when the evolutionary philosophy was 
apparently establishing its denial of the faith so 



The Answer to Materialism 93 

dear to the race. As the poet grew older and the 
inevitable disillusionment of age brought into still 
stronger relief the awful contradictions involved 
in the story of man's earthly vicissitudes and the 
apparent purposelessness of his higher nature in 
the materialistic conception, the dilemma became 
still more stern and relentless, and threw him 
back all the more surely upon immortality as the 
only possible explanation really satisfactory to the 
heart of man. The progress of this disillusion- 
ment in the life of Tennyson is clearly recorded in 
"Maud" (1855) and "Locksley Hall Sixty Years 
After" (1886), though it must be remembered 
that in them the poet is not speaking in his own 
person, but dramatically in the person of a mor- 
bid, hysterical, half-mad young man in the first 
instance, and in the second in the person of a 
querulous old man, who has seen all the splendor 
of his youthful hopes perish in the blank realities 
of life, and who has in consequence grown some- 
what soured and despondent of the race and of 
civilization. It is a terrible and bitter arraign- 
ment of the age they give us — so bitter and terrible 
that many, forgetting the poet's dramatic motive, 
have charged him with blank cynicism and pessi- 
mism. And indeed one must have seen with 
fearful distinctness the appalling evils of life and 
civilization to have written these poems and con- 



94 Tennyson 

ceived these characters. But for all this clash of 
opposites which in the darkest view constitutes 
human life here below, for the weltering sea of 
contradictions, of broken hopes, of blunted pur- 
poses, and thwarted aims, Tennyson in his darkest 
and most despondent moods found a satisfactory- 
resolution and reconcilement in his faith in the 
goodness of God, in the reality of virtue, and the 
validity of man's hopes of a future life. 

It is in the poem "Vastness,'*' published in 
1885 and accordingly one of his latest utterances 
upon this phase of the struggle between faith 
and doubt, that the dilemma is presented in 
most vivid antithesis. Here the poet's eye sweeps 
over the vast plain of human life, and views all 
the toil, the sin, and sorrow of the race. Only 
one spot is fair and undarkened by a dreadful 
opposite — the fireside where glows the warmth 
of the domestic emotions. Overwhelmed by the 
mystery and lost in the complexity of the scene, 
his heart cries out the insistent question, "What 
is all of it worth ?" On one side is falsehood 
triumphant over ttuth; valor pouring itself out 
alike for the wrong cause and for the right; faith 
lost in the gloom of doubt; innocence suffering 
with martyred charity; 

Star of the morning, Hope in the simrise ; gloom of the evening, 
Life at a close. 



The Answer to Materialism 95 

On this side is pleasure, with pain that like a worm 
has crawled from its corpse; wealth with his 
wedded harlots, and "honest poverty bare to the 
bone"; fame, and her shadow — slander; vows 
that are kept "to the last death-ruckle" and vows 
that are broken as soon as made. Here stands 
the figure of one 

that has lived for the kist of the minute, and died in the 
doing it, flesh without mind; 

and here the figure of another 

that has nail'd all flesh to the Cross, till Self died out in 
the love of his kind. 

All this the poet's eye surveys until, in strong 
compulsion of doubt, he cries with Job, "What is 
all of it worth ?" — 

What the philosophies, all the sciences, poesy, varying voices 
of prayer? 

All that is noblest, all that is basest, all that is filthy with 
all that is fair? 

What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own corpse- 
coffins at last, 

Swallow'd in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown'd in the deeps 
of a meaningless Past ? 

What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a moment's 
anger of bees in their hive ? — 

Peace, let it be! for I loved him, and love him forever: the 
dead are not dead but alive. 

Something of this must have been in his mind 
when he said, "I can hardly understand how 



96 Tennyson 

any great imaginative man, who has deeply lived, 
suffered, thought, and wrought, can doubt of the 
soul's continuous progress in the after life." 

Nevertheless, though Tennyson thus found in 
immortality a resolution of the everlasting coil of 
human existence, he was still sometimes troubled 
in spirit when he reflected upon the evils that 
seem to inhere in civilization, and to imply at 
least that there is no benevolent or omnipotent 
power guiding the course of history and working 
out a glorious purpose in creation. In some such 
mood he makes the dying Arthur, when he sees 
his great hopes perish in apparent failure and all 
his noble purposes brought to ruin through the 
wickedness of men, cry out: 

"I found Him in the shining of the stars, 
I mark'd Him in the flowering of His fields, 
But in His ways with men I find Him not. 

O me! for why is all around us here 
As if some lesser god had made the world. 
But had not force to shape it as he would, 
Till the High God behold it from beyond. 
And enter it, and make it beautiful?"^ 



^Cf. the words of "The Ancient Sage": 

But sonae in yonder city hold, my son, 

That none but Gods could build this house of ours. 

So beautiful, vast, various, so beyond 

All work of man, yet, like all work of man, 

A beauty with defect — till That which knows, 

And is not known, but felt thro' what we feel 

Within ourselves is highest, shall descend 

On this half-deed, and shape it at the last 

According to the Highest in the Highest. 



The Answer to Materialism 97 

But when the problem of man's progress thus 
oppressed him he invariably fell back upon his 
faith in the goodness of God and upon that 
evolutionary principle which, enlarged and ex- 
tended by his imaginative powers beyond the 
narrow circle of the material world to the story 
of human development, had brought him hope in 
the days of "In Memoriam," when his dead 
friend became to his thought the herald of the 
higher race that should be — that crowning race 
which is to reap the flower and fruit of all that 
mankind to-day hopes and suffers. This is the 
hope of "The Princess": 

This fine old world of ours is but a child 
Yet in the go-cart. Patience! Give it time 
To learn its limbs: there is a hand that guides. 

In **Maud" the young cynic is made to speak of 
the making of man — "He now is first: but is he 
the last ?" And finally in one of his latest poems, 
"The Dawn," published in the last volume he 
gave the world (1892), after enumerating all the 
evils of civilization and the various wrongs of the 
day, the poet asks his question and answers it: 
" Is the progress of the race slow and uncertain ? 
So be it: the race has still ages before it in which 
to grow to perfection!" 

A second inference of the evolutionary philoso- 
phy of the time — that, namely, touching morals 



98 Tennyson 

and involving the denial of an absolute moral 
law — ^was no less abhorrent to the mind of the 
poet than the other inferences concerning the 
immortality of the soul and the evolution of 
man's highest nature through a merely physical 
process. According to this viev^ the moral attri- 
butes of the race are nothing more than the sum 
of the inherited experiences of centuries of human 
fellowship, and man is a moral being only because 
he is a social being. This, for example, was the 
teaching of George Eliot, to whom conscience was 
"not an inner deliverance of fixed laws," but the 
"voice of sensibilities as various as our memories,'' 
as she has said, and the only retribution for 
wrongdoing the "retribution of deeds" and the 
"inward suffering" of which Parson Irwine speaks 
to Arthur Donnithorne in Adam Bede. But 
Tennyson clung to his belief in the reality of 
Virtue as firmly as he clung to his belief in the 
benevolence of God and his faith in the future 
life. To him, as to Wordsworth, Duty was ever 
the "stern Daughter of the voice of God," and 
Virtue and Truth absolute and unconditioned 
from the foundations of the world, involved in the 
very nature of the Infinite. Indeed, the poet's 
faith in one was a part of his faith in the other; 
he regarded immortality as an attribute of Virtue, 
just as he regarded Virtue as an evidence of 



The Answer to Materialism 99 

immortality and a sure evidence that life is not — 
in spite of its apparent contradictions, its fail- 
ures and disappointments — an idle dream or a 
futile labor. In eternal activity alone does Virtue 
find complete self-realization, and that is her only 
hope of requital. It is this thought to which 
Tennyson has given utterance in "Locksley Hall 
Sixty Years After" in the lines, written immedi- 
ately after the death of his younger son, Lionel 
(April, 1886), and following several couplets 
descriptive of his chief characteristics: 

Truth for truth, and good for good! The Good, the True, 

the Pure, the Just — 
Take the charm "For ever" from them, and they crumble 

into dust. 

And it is the same thought, somewhat less 
abstractly expressed, that appears in the poem 
"Wages," published in 1868: 

The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust, 
Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm 
and the fly? 

She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just, 
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky: 

Give her the wages of going on, and not to die. 

But what to the individual is the worth of 
devotion to virtue and the high and arduous 
pursuit of a noble ideal ? This is a question that 
arose in many minds at this time out of the 
negations of materialism, the denial of immortality 



100 Tennyson 

and of the divine and imperative nature of the 
moral law. Paul put the question in one of his 
letters — "If after the manner of beasts I have 
fought at Ephesus, v^hat advantageth it me, if 
the dead rise not ? let us eat and drink, for to- 
morrow we die." And Tennyson phrased it in 
more modern terms in his poem "By an Evolu- 
tionist," published in 1889: 

If my body come from brutes, my soul uncertain, or a fable, 

Why not bask amid the senses while the sun of morning 

shines, 

I, the finer brute rejoicing in my hounds, and in my stable, 

Youth and Health, and birth and wealth, and choice of 

women and of wines ? 

This question many of the poet's contemporaries 
answered, some in one way and some in another. 
Matthew Arnold, for instance, while rejecting 
the divine authority of Christ, clung to the 
ethical content of his teachings, and in a fine 
sonnet, "The Better Part," admonishes men, 
if there be no second life, to "Pitch this one 
high!" 

Sits there no judge in Heaven our sin to see? — 

More strictly, then, the inward judge obey! 

And George Eliot, also desiring to keep alive the 
spirit though denying the divine sanction of 
Christianity, sought to substitute the service of 
humanity for the service of God and to establish 



The Answer to Materialism ioi 

the religion of self-sacrifice and self-renunciation 
for the good of the race as an adequate ethical 
purpose in life. 

But Tennyson could not thus divorce morality 
from religion, conduct from faith. "Christianity 
with its divine morality," he said once, "but 
without the central figure of Christ, the Son of 
Man, would become cold, and it is fatal for 
religion to lose its warmth." In one of the 
early lyrics (XXXIII) of "In Memoriam," indeed, 
pondering on the issues of character as influenced 
and in part at least determined by faith, the poet 
warned those who seemed to themselves "to have 
reach'd a purer air" in finding "faith without 
the forms of faith," that faith through form is 
often "quicker unto good," and that men may 
fail in purity and goodness and service "ev'n for 
want of such a type" as is embodied in the forms 
of faith they have discarded. And this is the 
thought of many of his later poems as well. In 
"The Promise of May" (1882), a dramatic study 
of "a surface man of theories, true to none," 
Tennyson has made Dora express what seems to 
have been his own view of the matter: 

A soul with no religion — 
My mother used to say that such a one 
Was without rudder, anchor, compass — might be 
Blown every way with every gust and wreck 
On any rock — 



102 Tennyson 

while another dramatic utterance that seems to 
clothe the poet's own thought is found in the 
words of the nurse in the pathetic little poem "In 
the Children's Hospital" (1872): 

O how could I serve in the wards if the hope of the world 
were a lie? 

Nor is this the whole of the matter to Tennyson: 
faith was not only to his mind the essential prin- 
ciple of conduct and Duty the flower of religion; 
but duty done was also the source of religious and 
spiritual insight, one of the chief avenues through 
which the soul may enter into the full mysteries of 
spiritual truth. The saying of Christ was to him 
no meaningless word, but a profound article of 
faith attested by a rich and full personal expe- 
rience : "If any man willeth to do his will, he shall 
know of the teaching, whether it be of God, or 
whether I speak from myself." Thus the Ancient 
Sage admonishes the youth to let be his wail of 
unbelief, to help his fellow men, to curb the beast 
within him, to leave the "hot swamp of volup- 
tuousness," and lay his 

uphill shoulder to the wheel, 
And climb the Mount of Blessing, 

whence, perchance, he may beyond 

A himdred ever-rising mountain lines, 
And past the range of Night and Shadow — see 
The high-heaven dawn of more than mortal day- 
Strike on the Moimt of Vision, 



The Answer to Materialism 103 

This too, is the thought that glows beneath the 
majestic music of the "Ode on the Death of the 
Duke of WelHngton" (1852), as it is to receive 
fuller and more lovely utterance still in the Idyll 
of "The Holy Grail": 

He, that ever following her commands, 

On with toil of heart and knees and hands, 

Thro' the long gorge to the far light has won 

His path upward, and prevail'd. 

Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled 

Are close upon the shining table-lands 

To which our God Himself is moon and sun. 

To Tennyson, then, with this profound faith 
in the reality of Virtue, of God, and the Soul, and 
this strong conviction that a vital and deep 
religious experience is the source in turn of all 
true and high morality, as Duty done is also the 
means to a deeper spiritual insight, the one 
office, sole and single, of the individual in this 
life here below^ is to be true to the call of the 
highest, to be obedient to the inner vision. From 
such obedience alone flows whatever glorifies char- 
acter and hallows life. And in this lies Ten- 
nyson's answer to the question whether virtue is 
worth while to the creature of a day, or the pursuit 
of the far-off ideal is only a labor that spends 
itself in vain. That is the secret of the presence 
of evil in individual life; and Tennyson, accepting 
the evolutionary view of the development of man's 



104 Tennyson 

physical organism out of earlier and more brutish 
forms, expresses the struggle between the evil and 
the good in terms of the science of the day as a 
contest between the nature of the brute and the 
spiritual nature of man which in this world has 
been linked with it. Thus in "In Memoriam," 
in sections that were read to his friends some 
years before the publication of The Vestiges of 
Creation in 1844, h^ calls upon man to 

arise and fly 
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; 
Move upward, working out the beast, 
And let the ape and tiger die. 

In this point of view, particularly as presenting 
the sum of the poet's personal experience of the 
struggle between them, the poem ''By an Evolu- 
tionist," to which reference has already been 
made, is of peculiar significance. Here at eighty 
years he surveys the long course of his own 
battle, and declares its results: 

I have climb'd to the snows of Age, and I gaze at a field 
in the Past, 
Where I sank with the body at times in the slough of a 
low desire, 
But I hear no yelp of the beast, and the Man is quiet at last, 
As he stands on the heights of his life with a glimpse of a, 
height that is higher. 

That to Tennyson is the answer to the riddle of 
the ceaseless contest v/ith evil. Not alone is it. 



The Answer to Materialism 105 

as he has expressed it in "In Memoriam," the 
office of life to teach the man that he is himself. 
There is another and even greater lesson to be 
learned in this earthly school — to sound the 
depths of personality by realizing through one's 
own acts and the results of one's own choosing 
the absolute freedom of each individual to make 
or mar his eternal destiny. 

And this, the glory of the search after the 
higher things of the spirit, is the dominant prin- 
ciple of Tennyson's religious passion, as it is the 
dominant note of his poetry. He was always, 
as he has declared. Merlin, who followed the 
Gleam. Sometimes he embodied it, as in his 
earlier poems, with all a young man's disregard 
of the sternness of the pursuit and the bitter- 
ness of failure; and sometimes in the more som- 
ber colors that a deeper experience of life and 
a fuller knowledge of the struggle brought to 
him. 

Among the earlier poems, in which the theme 
receives its embodiment at the hands of one who 
had not yet learned the unremitting toil that 
attends the search after the ideal, but only knew 
the eager joy and gladsome longing of ingenuous 
youth, are "The Voyage" and "Ulysses," both of 
the volume of 1842. The first is a beautiful 
allegory of life from the point of view of youth. 



io6 Tennyson 

and IS full of the spirit of youthful devotion 
to the things of soul. 

We left behind the painted buoy- 
That tosses at the harbor-mouth; 

And madly danced our hearts with joy, 
As fast we fleeted to the South; 

How fresh was every sight and sound 
On open main or winding shore ! 

We knew the merry world was rotmd, 
And we might sail for evermore. 

Southward they sped by fair spice islands, and 
north again among the ice of polar seas; where 
new stars climbed above the rim of the horizon 
and where the naked moon ran far across 

The houseless ocean's heaving field ; 

by happy bowers and fairy climes they passed, by 
siren isles where flowers and naked limbs enticed 
to sensuous delight, but never once did they furl 
the sail or drop the anchor. 

For one fair Vision ever fled 

Down the waste waters day and night, 
And still we follow'd where she led, 

In hope to gain upon her flight. 
Her face was evermore unseen, 

And fixt upon the far sea-line ; 
But each man murmur'd, "O my Queen, 

I follow till I make thee mine." 

Sometimes she took the form of Virtue, sometimes 
of Knowledge, of Hope, or of Liberty, but in 
whatever guise she appeared they followed her, 
heedless of the blasts of the sea and in scorn of 
nature's laws. At length they reached the colder 



The Answer to Materialism 107 

climes of age; the mate was blind, the captain 
lame, and half the crew were sick or dead, but 
ever onward pressed the ship, and still the voya- 
gers called out their quest: 

But blind or lame or sick or sound, 
We follow that which flies before : 

We know the merry world is round, 
And we may sail for evermore. 

This, too, is the spirit of "Ulysses," a poem 
written, as the poet tells us, soon after Arthur 
Hallam's death, and giving his feeling about 
"the need of going forward and braving the 
struggle of life perhaps more simply than any- 
thing in 'In Memoriam/ '' It is the story of the 
old Ulysses, who after three years of peace in 
his rocky isle still yearns 

in desire 
To follow knowledge like a sinking star, 
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought, 

and accordingly calls his mariners once more to sail 
with him "the dark broad seas." It is evening, 
the evening of life for them too, — yet age has still 
its labor, as he reminds them: 

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: 

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep 

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 

he calls, 

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. 
Push off, and sitting well in order smite 
The sounding furrows ; for my purpose holds 
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 
Of all the western stars, until I die. 



io8 Tennyson 

But while Tennyson thus imaginatively por- 
trays the joys of the quest and all its high enthu- 
siasm, he is not blind to the negative aspects of 
the theme. In a trilogy of earlier poems, as 
v^ell as in some of the later "Idylls," he has drav^n 
v^ith terrible truth the fate of those who, doubt- 
ing the reality of the spiritual vision, make it a 
mockery and a thing for scorn, or, blind to its 
beauty and its fascination, yield up the search 
for it for sensuous pleasure and the lusts of the 
flesh. With growing intensity of moral purpose, 
but without transcending the limits of art, he 
has depicted in "The Palace of Art" (1832) the 
terror and remorse, the cynicism and despair, 
that ensue upon man's self-surrender to art for 
art's sake, and in "The Lotos-Eaters" (1832) the 
languor and self-indulgent ease of those who 
seek alone the titillation of the senses ; while 
in "The Vision of Sin" (1842) he has depicted 
the dreadful consequences of a life of pleasure. 
The first is a poem in which the theme is almost 
lost in beauty and skill of poetic picture — every 
quatrain a perfect landscape or portrait — and it 
tells the story of a sinful soul that, loving beauty 
alone, sacrificed to her selfish pleasure in it all 
the higher elements of her nature, and of how 
disgust and loathing fell upon her, and scorn of 
self and deep remorse. In "The Lotos-Eaters," 



The Answer to Materialism 109 

on the other hand, the poet has drawn with won- 
derful beauty of image, and melody and harmony 
of phrase, the land of the Lotos, where all the 
landscape is suffused with the languid effects 
of the Lotos blossom. In the midst of this 
pleasant country he has placed, reclining at ease, 
the mariners who have tasted of ^'the honey- 
sweet fruit of the Lotos*' and now desire ignoble 
rest from labor, *'long rest, or death, dark death, 
or dreamful ease." For the enervating poison 
of sensuous ease has crept upon their senses, 
upon their kindly human sentiments, until even 
the sorrow of separation from those they love 
has become a mild and soft regret, and finally 
upon their moral nature, dulling and deadening 
in them all the keen and eager joys of toil and of 
heroic achievement. 

It is, however, in "The Vision of Sin" that 
Tennyson has portrayed with most vivid effect 
the utter hideousness of sensualism. Here he 
has pictured as truthfully and remorselessly as 
George Eliot could have done, but with far more 
spiritual insight and poetic energy, all the loath- 
some consequences that come upon one who 
has given himself up to the delights of life that 
degenerate by natural process into the pleasures 
of the beast. In "The Voyage," indeed, there 
has already appeared one among the ship's crew 



no Tennyson 

who "saw not far: his eyes were dim," and who 
swore in consequence that the vision his comrades 
pursued was but a phantom of eyes diseased and 
clouded minds — 

"A ship of fools," he sneer'd and wept. 
And overboard one stormy night 
He cast his body. 

For in the conception of the poet despair and 
cynicism are ever the fruit of the disregard of the 
spiritual vision for whatever prize. And that is 
the theme of this terrible allegory, "The Vision 
of Sin.*' It is the vision of a youth upon the 
winged horse of his own soul — a horse borne down 
by the heavy weight of his rider, who enters into 
a palace of pleasure to seek the mirth and dear 
delight of wine, offcast and revelry. Incessantly, 
however, and almost imperceptibly his pleasures 
slip down into the coarse and fierce, until all of 
his powers of enjoyment are gone, though the 
seared and jaded appetites still urge to fiercer 
and more hideous excitements. He has grown 
blind to all the pure delights of the spirit, to all 
the glorious beauty of the mountain and the 
morning sky, and heedless of the heavy and 
formless vapor, hueless and cold, that gradually 
envelops him. Cynicism and despair become his 
portion, and contempt for all that in life and 
character is high and holy — love, truth, virtue, 



The Answer to Materialism hi 

honor, friendship, — and utter scorn of good. In 
the recklessness of his degradation he sings his 
moldy song, a toast to the emptiness of life and 
to his own dishonor: 

Fill the can, and fill the cup: 

All the windy ways of men 
Are but dust that rises up, 

And is lightly laid again. 

At length a mystic mountain top appears, and 
three Voices speak from out the dawn over the 
gulf that festers with the dead bodies of men and 
horses quickening into lower forms of life. One 
pronounces judgment: 

Behold! it was a crime 
Of sense avenged by sense that wore with time. 

A second Voice in measured emphasis continues 
the award of earthly justice; 

The crime of sense became 
The crime of malice, and is equal blame. 

And a third in human pity calls: 

He had not wholly quench'd his power; 
A little grain of consicence made him sour. 

Thus far the world and its discernment of the 
operation of merely physical law; but Tennyson 
was not content to leave the case to the final 
adjudicature of an earthly court; there still 
remains for him the awful question of the sinful 
souFs relation to the moral law he had offended 



112 Tennyson 

and to the Infinite who had established it — a 
problem to his mind ever veiled in mystery. A 
fourth Voice, therfore, is heard calling to the 
summit, "Is there any hope ?'* 

To which an answer pealed from that high land, 
But in a tongue no man could understand; 
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn 
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.^ 

Closely akin to these earlier poems in theme, 
but of far broader range and deeper imaginative 
and spiritual insight, are several belonging to this 
period of controversy with materialism in which 
Tennyson has depicted his sense of the blighting 
effects upon the human sentiments and sensi- 
bilities of certain deductions from the materialis- 
tic synthesis when they are made the rules of 
individual conduct. Two of them, *'In the 
Children's Hospital" (1880) and "The Promise 
of May" (1882), are dramatic studies in the 
interpretation of which the dramatic principle 

iPor this mystery Tennyson attempts no solution in his poetry— 
indeed, he makes only a few allusions to it in his verse. In this 
connection, however, the words of the poet's son are of interest as 
showing one phase of his speculations concerning it: "I have even 
heard him say that 'he would rather know that he was to be lost 
eternally than not to know that the whole human race was to live 
eternally' ; and when he speaks of ' faintly trusting the larger hope' he 
means by ' the larger hope ' that the whole human race would, through, 
perhaps, ages of suffering, be at length purified and saved, even those 
who now 'better not with time'; so that at the end of 'The Vision 
of Sin' we read 

God made Himself an awful rose of dawn." 

See Memoir, vol. i, p. 321. 



The Answer to Materialism 113 

must be constantly kept in view. While they 
present portraits of men who have in one sense 
or another adopted the materialistic view of life, 
it must be borne in mind that these portraits are 
imaginative studies in character, in which a crass 
materialism, deadened sensibilities, and a blunted 
moral sense appear as elements of the whole con- 
ception rather than as in the relation of cause 
and effect. Indeed, in the case of one of them, 
the famous specialist in the poem "In the Chil- 
dren's Hospital," the real personality of the man 
can scarcely be said to be portrayed, but only a 
conception of his character as it is seen and 
judged by the nurse who describes him. But 
these poems, nevertheless, are of direct value in 
this connection, as showing the strong imaginative 
and emotional grasp which Tennyson had of the 
moral possibilities involved in the practice of the 
principles implied in the materialistic philoso- 
phy; and though he would have been slow indeed 
to assert that moral degeneration is inevitable 
whenever the individual adopts the materialistic 
view of life, yet it certainly is a logical inference 
from his conception of the relation of religion 
to morals, as has been seen, that the tendency 
of pure materialism, when unchecked by estab- 
lished institutions and unrestrained by a religious 
environment, and even then in the long run, is 



114 Tennyson 

toward the production of just such conditions of 
character as are in these poems portrayed. 

"In the Children's Hospital" is a pathetic 
little poem, full of the tenderness and human 
sympathy the great poet always shows in dealing 
with the common aspects of life and all its trivial 
or grave concerns. But its interest in this con- 
nection, as has been intimated, lies in the types 
of character it presents — the contrast between 
the nurse and the kindly old doctor, on the one 
hand, who served in the wards in the spirit of 
Christ, and on the other the famous physician. 
Fresh from the surgery-schools of France and of other lands, 
who to the tender heart of the nurse seemed to 
have lost all tenderness and pity for those to 
whom he ministered — 

"I could think he was one of those who would break their 

jests on the dead, 
And mangle the living dog that had loved him and fawn'd 

at his knee," 

she says. For his eyes and voice were not kind, 
and when she, bending over a hopeless case, 
whispered of prayer and the "dear Lord Jesus," 
he gruffly pushed her aside and muttered half to 
himself, but so that she heard him say, 
"All very well — but the good Lord Jesus has had his day." 
In "The Promise of May," on the other hand, 
Tennyson has sketched as the background of the 



The Answer to Materialism 115 

drama all the simple life of a village in rural 
England, where faith and the traditions of the 
past still hold their mild authority, and where 
the kindly emotions that bind man to man are 
natural in their play and free from the sophis- 
tications of self-interest, where the attachment 
of master and man from generation to genera- 
tion is deep and true, where the friendship and 
neighborly regard of a countryside is unbroken, 
where the sanctity of the marriage tie and of 
the domestic emotions is regarded, and all the 
innocence and tender content of the lovers in the 
fields find utterance in the sweet song of the 
haymakers : 

For me an' my Sally we swear'd to be true, 

To be true to each other, let 'appen what maSy, 

Till the end of the daay 

And the last load hoam. 

Against this background the poet has portrayed, 
in the story of Philip Edgar, all the possibilities 
involved in the materialistic principle when its 
implications become the rule of human action. 
It is true that Philip Edgar is a man of no settled 
convictions,^ and that he has adopted materialism 
only as a convenient instrument of self-justifica- 

*The character of Edgar has been frequently misunderstood and 
misinterpreted. One of the first performances of the play, for exam- 
ple, was interrupted by the Marquis of Queensberry, who, springing 
to lais feet and declaring himself to be an agnostic, protested against 
what he called "Mr. Tennyson's abominable caricature." See 
Memoir, vol. ii, pp. 267-269. 



ii6 Tennyson 

tion. But in the poet's presentation of the shame 
and dishonor that Edgar brought upon the girl 
who loved him and trusted him too well, and 
the distress in consequence that overtook all to 
whom she was dear, he has developed with strik- 
ing imaginative insight and brought to view the 
dangers to the home and to the sacred emotions 
of the heart that lurk in the teachings of the 
materialistic philosophy; and at the same time 
in his fine dramatic handHng of the course of 
Edgar's cynicism and remorse, and the final 
retribution of conscience that overtakes him, he 
has shown with equal emotional power and effect 
the utter inadequacy of that philosophy to satisfy 
the better elements of man's nature. Nothing, 
indeed, that Tennyson has done in the unfolding 
of this theme is dramatically finer or more to 
the point of the present purpose than this subjec- 
tive action of Edgar's heart and conscience under 
the play of circumstance and remorse. With 
unerring logic the young man is made to unfold 
all the inner bearings upon life and character of 
that view of life to which he turns in his endeavor 
to justify himself to himself. 

Already at his first appearance on the stage 
the youth has determined to abandon the girl 
whom he has betrayed, and is reading a book — 

To steel myself against the leaving her? 



The Answer to Materialism 117 

he asks himself — in which with the "charm of 
simple style and close dialectic" the author has 
all but proved man to be an "automatic series 
of sensations." If this be true, he thinks, the 
inference is plain — 

What can a man, then, live for but sensations, 
Pleasant ones? 

The Gods have passed. Nature is blind; and if 
man cannot take his pleasure save at the cost of 
another's pain — 

Well — is not that the course of Nature too, 
From the dim dawn of Being — her main law 
Whereby she grows in beauty — that her flies 
Must massacre each other? 

As for love, he thinks it but an affinity of the flesh, 
and marriage an old tradition, the bridal veil and 
ring mere trinkets of the Church; 

if we did not strain to make ourselves 
Better and higher than Nature, we might be 
As happy as the bees there at their honey 
In these sweet blossoms. 

Virtue, too, he regards as a mere conventionality, 
for 

one time's vice may be 
The virtue of another; and Vice and Virtue 
Are but two masks of self. 

And yet Edgar, even though he seeks to hide 
himself behind this hard and defensive cynicism, 
cannot altogether escape the stings of conscience, 



ii8 Tennyson 

or silence the voice of the nobler instincts that 
cry out against the outrage he is doing them. In 
spite of himself and his shallow philosophy, 
remorse awakes; and though at first he yields to 
nothing further than a desire to make amends, 
yet at the end it overwhelms him with a sense 
of his utter baseness when he finally sees himself 
in his true colors. It is here again that the 
poet's dramatic insight is fine and true, as he 
makes those very feelings that spring out of the 
best elements of Edgar's nature involve him in 
a contradiction which throws him back in turn 
upon a sense of his bondage to the inexorable 
laws of heredity as presented by the philosophy 
he has adopted: 

O my God, if man be only 
A willy-nilly current of sensations — 
Reaction needs must follow revel — yet — 
Why feel remorse, he, knowing that he must have 
Moved in the iron grooves of Destiny? 
Remorse then is a part of Destiny, 
Nature a liar, making us feel guilty 
Of her own faults. 

O this mortal house, 
Which we are born into, is haunted by 
The ghosts of the dead passions of dead men; 
And these take flesh again with our own flesh, 
And bring us to confusion. 

Shallow as Edgar is, it is with unerring and 
inevitable logic that he unfolds before his mind 



The Answer to Materialism 119 

all the ugly and frightful contradictions involved 
in this conception of life: 

Sometimes I wonder, 
When man has surely learnt at last that all 
His old-world faith, the blossoms of his youth, 
Has faded, falling fruitless — whether then 
All of us, all at once, may not be seized 
With some fierce passion, not so much for Death 
As against Life! 

Elsewhere Tennyson has more directly ad- 
dressed himself to the presentation of the purely 
subjective bearings of the materialistic synthesis, 
the negative experience of unbelief, as it may 
be called in contrast with the positive spiritual 
satisfaction that flows from faith. The poem, 
for example, to which he has given the title of 
"Despair," and which was first published in 
The Nineteenth Century^ for November, 1881, 
contains a fine expression, dramatic in form, of 
the poet's sense of the ghastliness of the denial 
of God and the Soul by the materialistic philoso- 
phy, and the utter hideousness of its failure to 
satisfy the spiritual wants and aspirations and 
convictions of man. The poem, indeed, is prompt- 

iThat Tennyson should have chosen to publish this poem in The 
Nineteenth Century is significant, in view of the Prefatory Sonnet he 
contributed to the initial number in March, 1877. It is in this maga- 
zine, he says, that 

some descending from the sacred peak 
Of hoar high-templed Faith, have leagued again 
Their lot with ours to rove the world about; 
And some are wilder comrades, sworn to seek 
If any golden harbor be for men 
In seas of Death and sunless gulfs of Doubt. 



120 Tennyson 

ed by a more complex artistic motive than simply 
to portray the play of the finer sensibilities under 
the propension of unbelief. Its wider purpose is 
to present, with historical truth and imaginative 
vividness, that solemn overwhelming dilemma 
into which many eager and alert seekers after 
spiritual truth at the time when it was written 
were being forced by certain aspects of the thought 
of the age, and their recoil into the darkness of 
despair from its equally repellent, but, as it 
would seem, all-inclusive, alternatives. Testing 
all formulations of religious truth by the measure 
with which they meet and satisfy the deeper 
needs of man's nature, Tennyson had a keen and 
active sense of the falsity — as being in essential 
contradiction to these higher aspirations and 
convictions of men — of those conceptions of God, 
current at the time, which, revolting though they 
were, were for many apparently the only possi- 
ble alternatives to the baldest atheism. Unable 
within the deepest recesses of the heart to 
acquiesce either in the conception of a Godless 
world, on the one hand, which science seemed to 
be forcing upon them, or in those religious teach- 
ings, on the other, which made God appear as a 
being of infinite hate and infinite cruelty, many, 
like the protagonist in the poem, "broke away 
from the Christ, our human brother and friend" — 



The Answer to Materialism 121 

For He spoke, or it seem'd that He spoke, of a Hell without 
help, without end — 

and fell back into a despair that was unbroken, 
save for a still unsilenced but feeble hope that 
after all, and in spite of all denial, there might 
still be a God who would at length reveal himself 
in love and pity in response to the imperious 
needs of the human heart. ^ And all this the poet 
has presented, portraying dramatically and con- 
cretely — and in the interpretation of these verses 
one must never lose sight of the fact that the pas- 
sion of the poem is dramatic and not personal — 
the revolt of the heart against both alternatives 
of the dilemma and the awful pathos of its despair. 
It is, however, with only one phase of the theme 
that our concern in this connection lies — ^with 
the subjective experience, that is to say, of the 
materialistic synthesis. And nowhere has Ten- 
nyson unfolded with greater power than here all 
the sad astrology of a Godless world — the over- 
whelming sense of the dreadful abandonment of 
man and his utter helplessness amid the dead, 

^That many were throwing off all religion on precisely these grounds 
— the popular notions of divine wrath and future punishment, "mul- 
titudes pretending to believe in God while they mean the Devil" — 
was the conviction of Maurice as early as 1853, the year of his expul- 
sion from King's College. Life of F. D. Maurice, vol. ii, chap, v, 
passim. Cf. also, Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, vol. i, p. 322, 
where the poet expresses his disappointment that the translators of 
the Bible had not used some other word than "everlasting" in their 
translation of the passage, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into ever- 
lasting fire." "For he never would believe that Christ could preach 
' everlasting punishment. ' ' ' 



122 Tennyson 

vast, immeasurable forces of the universe, that 
like an enormous engine is driving on to rend 
him limb from limb; the hopeless misery of exist- 
ence under the apprehension that love and virtue, 
and all the nobler instincts and aspirations of 
the race, are bootless and vain; and, finally, that 
**fierce passion against life" which in the poet's 
conception is always the aftergrowth when 
faith in God and hope of a life to come have been 
destroyed and uprooted from the human heart. 

O we poor orphans of nothing — alone on that lonely shore — 
Born of the brainless Nature who knew not that which she 
bore! 

is the cry of the man in his terrible isolation.* 

And the suns of the limitless Universe sparkled and shone 

in the sky, 
Flashing with fires as of God, but we knew that their light 

was a lie — 
Bright as with deathless hope — but, however they sparkled 

and shone, 
The dark little worlds running round them were worlds of 

woe like our own — 
No soul in the heaven above, no soul on the earth below, 
A fiery scroll written over with lamentation and woe.^ 

iCf. Browning's "Epilogrue" to "Dramatis Personas," Second 
Speaker. 

^Cf. in this connection and in further illustration of Tennyson's 
imaginative sense of the overwhelming nothingness of man and the 
dreadful determinism of natvure in the materialistic conception, Maud, 
XVIII, 4: 

brought to understand 
A sad astrology, the boundless plan 
That makes you tyrants in your iron skies, 
Innumerable, pitiless, passionless eyes, 
Cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand 
His nothingness into man. 



The Answer to Materialism 123 

Thus with the inescapable logic of the feelings the 
insistent question presses upon the sufferer when 
material disaster has crowded upon him, when 
his dearest affections have been betrayed, and he 
has lost his sense of the reality of virtue and 
truth. 

Why should we bear with an hour of torture, a moment 

of pain, 
If every man die for ever, if all his griefs are in vain, 
And the homeless planet at length will be wheel'd thro* 

the silence of space, 
Motherless evermore of an ever- vanishing race, 
When the worm shall have writhed its last, and its last 

brother-worm will have fled 
From the dead fossil skull that is left in the rocks of an 

earth that is dead? 

Herein, then, lies the sum of Tennyson's answer 
to materialism — in his profound sense of the 
reality of the unseen, his vivid emotional and 
imaginative apprehension of the utter vacuity of 
the materialistic synthesis when tested by the 
deepest convictions and noblest aspirations of 
the race, and his unshaken assurance, in spite of 
all negation and denial, that only in the spiritu- 
alistic doctrine of things can a satisfactory basis of 
life and conduct be found. This religious philos- 
ophy he has presented again and again, as has 
been seen in the poems examined; and it has been 
presented with varying imagery and under a rich 



124 Tennyson 

diversity of setting and circumstances, but always 
in terms of art and beauty and through the 
universal and symbolic forms of imagination and 
feeling. It is expressed, finally, in its most 
characteristic aspect and spirit, and in definite 
opposition to the principles of the antagonistic 
system of thought in *'The Ancient Sage," a 
poem that was published in 1885. 

Two figures move before us in this poem, a 
Seer — who, wearied of the noise of life and the 
confusion of the world, leaves the haunts of men 
to spend his one last year in meditation among the 
hills — and a youth, who, though he loved and hon- 
ored the reverend man, was yet not his disciple. 
Neither of the characters is very sharply individ- 
ualized. The youth, indeed, is not much more 
than a convenient interlocutor to whom the Sage 
may direct his conversation. But he is an 
agnostic — and in this a type of mind not uncom- 
mon at the time to which the poem belongs — and 
his view of life and character is darkened by the 
implications of materialism and by the languor 
and dullness of spirit and the gentle stoicism to 
which in the conception of the poet the practice 
of its precepts inevitably leads. The Sage, on 
the other hand, is almost the personification of 
the thought and faith of Tennyson at seventy-six, 
an expression of his most intimate and personal 



The Answer to Materialism 125 

views in matters of faith. "The poem," he says 
in comment upon it, "is very personal. The 
passages about Taith' and the Tassion of the 
Past' were especially my own personal feelings." 
At the beginning of the colloquy the old man 
is standing before a cavern "whence an affluent 
fountain pour'd," when in beautiful symbolism 
he expresses to the youth his calm belief in the 
high celestial origin of the spirit of man : 

This wealth of waters might but seem to draw 
From yon dark cave, but, son, the source is higher, 
Yon summit half-a-league in air — and higher. 
The cloud that hides it — ^higher still, the heavens 
Whereby the cloud was molded, and whereout 
The cloud descended. Force is from the heights.* 

But the youth pushes aside as unproven and 
incapable of proof, and therefore unbelievable, 
the fine faith of his aged companion. "But man 
to-day," he says, 

is fancy's fool 
As man hath ever been. 
The nameless Power, or Powers, that rule 
Were never heard or seen. 

What powers these may be, he does not presume 
to guess, whether "aught akin to Mind" or mere- 



iThe recurrence of this and similar imagery in the poetry of Tenny- 
son to symbolize the spiritual origin of man is extremely significant. 
Cf. "The Two Greetings," "The Coming of Arthur," and "In Memo- 
riam ," cm, 2. 



126 Tennyson 

\y the blind forces of a dead universe — "power 
as of the Gods gone bhnd." In human history 
he sees no guiding hand, no rulers over human 
destiny but "the Days and Hours/' 

For all that laugh, and all that weep, 

And all that breathe are one 
Slight ripple on the boundless deep 

That moves, and all is gone. 

Thus far the unripe protagonist of unbelief: 
but in loving opposition to his denials, and in 
gentle contradiction, Tennyson, in the person 
of the Sage, speaks out the faith that is within 
him, admonishing the youth that he must not 
look to find adequate grounds for belief in God 
through the world of sense-impression or the cold 
and barren processes of the ratiocinative faculty 
alone : 

Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son. 

For nothing worthy proving can be proven. 
Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise, 
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, 
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith! 

And yet — out of his own experience he urges it — 
within the deeper levels of human nature there do 
come genuine perceptions of spiritual truth which 
are indeed the fountain light of all our day, and 
upon which unreasoned and immediate assurance 
faith establishes her real and abiding foundations. 



The Answer to Materialism 127 

If thou would'sl hear the Nameless, and wilt dive 
Into the Temple-cave of thine own self, 
There, brooding by the central altar, thou 
May'st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice, 
By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise. 

And if the Nameless should withdraw from all 
Thy frailty counts most real, all thy world 
Might vanish like thy shadow in the dark.^ 

Thus step by step the Seer, speaking with the 
authority of wisdom, confutes the negations of 
his youthful friend, whose philosophy is the fruit 
of doubt and of a Hfe "worn from wasteful living." 
Time, he reminds him, is but a form of thought 
by which thin-minded men seek to 

Break into "Thens" and "Whens" the Eternal Now; 

and light and darkness are but relative to the 
finite vision of men, who perchance await 

the last and largest sense to make 
The phantom walls of this illusion fade. 
And show us that the world is wholly fair. 

Man still is conscious of his eternal destiny, re- 
gardless of the cry of materialism concerning him 
— for come there no mystic intimations of im- 
mortality, no murmurs from the past, no divine 
farewell — desolate sweetness — far and far away — 

^"Take away belief in the self-conscious personality of God," 
Tennyson used to say, "and you take away the backbone of the 
world." See Memoir, vol. i, p. 311. Cf. also, p. 122. 



128 Tennyson 

that whisper of another world than this of sense ?* 
And, finally, he concludes with a description of 
that ineffable experience which to Tennyson po- 
larized all his life through and through with the 
sentiment of the reality of spirit: 

And more, my son! for more than once when I 

Sat all alone, revolving in myself 

The word that is the symbol of myself, 

The mortal limit of the Self was loosed. 

And past into the Nameless, as a cloud 

Melts into Heaven. I touch'd my limbs, the limbs 

Were strange, not mine — and yet no shade of doubt, 

But utter clearness, and thro' loss of Self 

The gain of such large life as match'd with ours 

Were Sun to spark — unshadowable in words, 

Themselves but shadows of a shadow- world. * 



1" The 'Passion of the Past' I used to feel as a boy," said Tennyson. 
And so the lines in "The Ancient Sage": 

Today? but what of yesterday? for oft 
On me, when boy, there came what then I call'd, 
Who knew no books and no philosophies, 
In my boy- phrase "The Passion of the Past." 
The first gray streak of earHest summer-dawn, 
The last long stripe of waning crimson gloom, 
As if the late and early were but one — 
A height, a broken grange, a grove, a flower 
Had murmurs, " Lost and gone and lost and gone!" 
A breath, a whisper — some divine farewell — 
Desolate sweetness — far and far away — 
What had he loved, what had he lost, the boy? 
I know not and I speak of what has been. 
Cf. "The Two Voices" (stanzas 127, 128), and "Far — far — away." 
'To experiences of this sort Tennyson has alluded several times in 
his poetry. Cf. in particular the visions of Arthur in the closing 
paragraphsof "The Holy Grail," and " In Memoriam," XCV, stanzas 
9-11. Says his son (Memoir, vol. i, p. 320): "In some phases of 
thought and feeling his idealism tended more decidedly to mysticism. 
He wrote: 'A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up 
from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come 
upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to my- 
self silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the con- 
sciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dis- 
solve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused 



The Answer to Materialism 129 

"The Ancient Sage/' then, Hke "The Two 
Voices" of fifty years earher, is a colloquy between 
faith and doubt under the impulse of materialism; 
but, less argumentative than its earlier prototype, 
it is more concrete and universal — as well as of a 
more secure and certain note — in its expression 
of spiritual truth; and it is enriched by that sane 
and wholesome wisdom that is the fruit of a full 
and varied experience of life and long-continued 
meditations upon the things of the spirit. In the 
earlier poem "two voices" contended in abstract 
debate for mastery over the heart, the "dark 
voice" being silenced at length but not confuted. 
But in "The Ancient Sage" faith speaks with the 
voice of authority and the calm assurance of one 
who knows the truth of that which he believes. 
And in this the two poems represent the temper 
of the poet's faith at two distant periods of his 
life. Between "The Two Voices" of 1833 and 
"The Ancient Sage" of 1885 lies all the long 
and difficult pilgrimage from troubled doubt and 
uncertain faith to the Delectable Mountains of 
spiritual assurance. "The Ancient Sage," indeed, 
is the serene and reasoned utterance of the ulti- 
mate faith to which the poet attained, in spite 

state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the 
weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an 
almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were; 
seeming no extinction, but the only true life.' " 



130 Tennyson 

of frequent but temporary moods of gloom and 
spiritual dismay which overtook him during the 
controversy with unbelief, and of the subjective 
evidence upon which he established it. It is 
Tennyson's final answer to materialism. 



CHAPTER IV 

OF THE ETHICAL AND SOCIAL BEARINGS OF 
TENNYSON'S PHILOSOPHY 

That Tennyson's speculations concerning the 
things of the spirit rooted themselves deeply in 
the actualities of life has clearly developed in 
connection v^ith the poems examined in the 
foregoing chapters. All his meditations and re- 
flections, hov^ever mystical at times they became, 
sustain a constant and vital relation to the prac- 
tical moralities, to conduct and character. Indeed, 
it has appeared that while he urged with all in- 
sistence the dependence of morality upon religion 
— as late as 1887 observing that "evil must 
come upon us headlong, if morality tries to 
get on without religion" — he urged with no less 
emphasis and energy that for the sake of true 
religion itself the normal religious passions must 
find expression in corresponding activities. The 
surest ground of faith, it has been noted, the 
strongest evidence of the validity of the spiritual 
instincts, to him lay not alone in what may be 
called the subjective aspects of his experience — 
in that inward joy, that lucid sense of the solution 

of the mysteries of life, and that spiritual satis- 

131 



132 Tennyson 

faction which comes from tn sense of the per- 
fect adaptation of religion to the higher spiritual 
needs of human nature — but as well in its ethi- 
cal content, in the fulfillment by the religious 
impulse of the moral aspirations and desires of 
man, and in the completeness with which religion 
brings the individual into harmony and active 
cooperation with the supreme Will of the uni- 
verse. "It is impossible to imagine," he once 
remarked,^ "that the Almighty will ask you, when 
you come before Him in the next life, what your 
particular form of creed was: but the question 
will rather be, *Have you been true to yourself, 
and given in My Name a cup of cold water to one 
of these little ones ? ' " This impatience with all 
religious profession that is not supported by 
practice — an impatience partly ethical and partly 
springing from the poet's feeling that infinite 
truth cannot be clothed in "matter-molded forms 
of speech'' — this test of reality in practice is 
expressed again and again in his noblest poems. 
It is expressed finally in "Akbar's Dream" 
(1892), in which he represents the great Mogul 
emperor and sage as declaring that prayers un- 
accompanied by deeds are futile in the eyes of 
Allah, likening them to mothers who die in child- 
birth of dead sons. 



^Cf. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, vol. i, p. 309. 



Bearings of Tennyson's Philosophy 133 

The ethical influence of Tennyson's poetry is, 
therefore, immense, and it is as noble as his 
spiritual philosophy from which it derives is 
profound. He is prophet and preacher no less 
than priest and seer. And it should be observed 
in this connection that the primary motive of all 
of his work as an artist is moral. He never 
acquiesced in the theory of art for art's sake, but 
held steadfastly throughout his life to the treat- 
ment of moral ideas with energy and depth — 
which Voltaire remarked as the chief glory of 
English poetry — as the supreme law of poetry 
as of all art. This he first expressed in the 
allegory of "The Palace of Art" in 1832; and in 
"Locksley Hall Sixty Years After" in the person 
of the aged critic of the age he utters a rebuke — 
extravagant in tone as the speaker in whose 
mouth it is placed, but essentially deserved in 
view of certain tendencies of the period — a rebuke 
to those who 

Paint the mortal shame of nature with the living hues of Art; 
who 

Feed the budding rose of boyhood with the drainage of 

their sewer; 
Send the drain into the fountain, lest the stream should 

issue pure; 

and ruthlessly 

Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism. 



134 Tennyson 

Against all this false art Tennyson sternly sets his 
face; he is always noble in his view of life and in 
his portrayal of it, and as an artist never ignores 
the eternal laws of human conduct, the laws that 
govern the affections and the passions and deter- 
mine the values of all human relationships in a 
moral sense, never forgets the immutable order 
of truth and right. 

The very root and center of Tennyson's ethical 
teaching, as has already been suggested,^ is his 
strong belief that the meaning of the universe is 
moral, that virtue and truth are a part of the 
essential order of things established from the 
very foundations of the world, and that Duty is 
a divine and imperative condition of all human 
activity, a condition implanted within the human 
heart as a standard of conduct. Thus in obedi- 
ence to this Gareth exclaims, when his mother 
fondly urges him to remain with her, to follow the 
deer in youthful idleness, and not to seek the city 
of Arthur: 

"Follow the deer? follow the Christ, the King, 

Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King — 

Else, wherefore born?" 

And even the wretched Queen, overwhelmed with 
the remorse of her evil deeds, when Arthur spoke 
to her his last farewell and rode away in the mist, 

iCf. p. 98. 



Bearings of Tennyson's Philosophy 135 

and in his great forgiveness all the grandeur of his 
character shone upon her moral sense, cried: 

"Ah my God, 
What might I not have made of thy fair world, 
Had I but loved thy highest creatui-e here? 
It was my duty to have loved the highest : 
It surely was my profit had I known : 
It would have been my pleasure had I seen. 
We needs must love the highest when we see it. 
Not Lancelot, nor another." 

A deep ethical significance, moreover, underlies 
the poet's vivid presentation of the hideous 
aspects of sensualism, of the vacuity of life when 
spent only for the things of the flesh, and of the 
penalties that inflict themselves upon bodv and 
soul of him 

that has lived for the lust of the minute, and died in the 
doing it, flesh without mind. 

Again and again, as in "The Vision of Sin," he 
has unfolded v^ith impressive imagery the certain 
and inevitable operation of the moral law with 
regard to the sensual impulses and the animal 
appetities — the gentle allurements and solicita- 
tions to pleasure that through repeated indulgence 
become the stern and ruthless masters of a will 
impoverished and enslaved, exacting an endless 
"repetition of compliance" though with each 
indulgence the capacity for gratification is dimin- 



136 Tennyson 

ished at the same time that desire is increasingly 
stimulated. This, indeed, is one of the great 
ethical motives of the '^Idylls of the King," in 
which also he has portrayed with all the fervor 
of an intense moral passion another law — that 
the secret indulgence of vicious desires and unholy 
emotions issues in scorn of purity and good and 
in a final open violation of all that is noble in 
human life. This is the principle that embodies 
itself in the story of Vivien with her false song of 
the honor of flesh against what she calls the 
envious teachings of priests and ascetics: 

"Old priest, who mumble worship in your quire — 
Old monk and nun, ye scorn the world's desire. 
Yet in your frosty cells ye feel the fire ! 
The fire of Heaven is not the flame of Hell." 

The knights grow tolerant of her slander and her 
sensual creed — 

It made the laughter of an afternoon 

That Vivien should attempt the blameless King — 

until at length the secret practice of the court 
burst out into open rebellion against Arthur and 
their vows of purity, and in the irony of "The 
Last Tournament." 

On the other hand, the paramount duty of the 
individual, according to the poet's teaching, is 
to curb the instincts of the brute and to secure 



Bearings of Tennyson's Philosophy 137 

mastery over the lusts of life. This is the supreme 
ethical obligation enforced in "In Memoriam": 

Arise and fly 
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; 
Move upward, working out the beast, 
And let the ape and tiger die. 

And it is the "godly and wholesome doctrine'' of 
a later poem, "By an Evolutionist" (1889): 

If my body come from brutes, tho' somewhat finer than 
their own, 
I am heir, and this my kingdom. Shall the royal voice 
be mute? 
No, but if the rebel subject seek to drag me from the throne, 
Hold the scepter, Human Soul, and rule thy Province 
of the brute. 

So also in the poem "Will" (1854) he has expressed 
his sense of the ethical value of that multitude 
of voluntary impulses, affections, purposes, and 
resolves which according to Kant constitute what 
has been called "the good will," and which 
though frequently not directly made effective by 
spoken word or open act determine so diligently 
the issues of life, of good and evil: 

O well for him whose will is strong! 
He suffers, but he will not suffer long; 
He suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong. 

But ill for him who, bettering not with time. 
Corrupts the strength of heaven-descended Will, 
And ever weaker grows thro' acted crime. 
Or seeming-genial venial fault, 
Recurring and suggesting still! 



138 Tennyson 

Moreover, in this point of view, since character 
is determined by purpose expressed in conduct and 
conduct becomes noble in proportion as its end 
is high, Tennyson's conception of the value of the 
ideal in human life and of the significance to 
the individual of the unwearied pursuit of it, 
as it has been presented in "The Voyage" and 
"Ulysses,"^ is of a profound ethical import. The 
moral world, like the spiritual, has an illimitable 
horizon which opens out before the vision, as the 
natural world stretched away before the eager 
gaze of old Ulysses, and 

all experience is an arch wherethro' 
Gleams that tintravel'd world, whose margin fades 
For ever and for ever when I move. 

Thus the highest conduct is progressive, and 

men may rise on stepping-stones 
Of their dead selves to higher things. 

So spiritual aspiration results in moral power 
and the enrichment of character, and 

life piled on life 
Were all too little 

for the fulfillment of the ethical purposes of man. 

Eternal process moving on, 

From state to state the spirit walks, 

becoming more and more like the supreme good, 
gaining constantly in moral grandeur and in "the 
wrestling thews that throw the world." This 

iCf. p. 105. 



Bearings of Tennyson's Philosophy 139 

is the ethical enforcement of "Ulysses'' and of a 
number of other poems, as well as the "Idylls of 
the King," and it is the ethical note of several 
of his more purely personal poems, in which the 
poet has given utterance to his own lyric cry. 
Thus, in his old age surveying the course of his 
long voyage and knowing the worth in terms of 
character of his own arduous pursuit after the 
higher things of life, in "Merlin and the Gleam" 
(1889) he sends out his call to the younger gener- 
ation crowding to the shore: 

Not of the sunlight, 
Not of the moonHght, 
Not of the starHght! 
O young Mariner, 
Down to the haven, 
Call your companions, 
Launch your vessel, 
And crowd your canvas, 
And, ere it vanishes 
Over the margin, 
After it, follow it. 
Follow The Gleam. 

In accordance with this conception, the central 
point in the ethical significance of Tennyson's 
ideal of human character is obedience to the law 
of the highest and self-mastery in fulfillment of 
that law — these with all that they imply of truth 
and purity are to his mind the essential elements 
of perfect manhood. 

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control. 
These three alone lead life to sovereign power, 



140 Tennyson 

is the declaration of Pallas to Paris, when he 
stands before her pondering the bribe of Juno and 
the award of the golden apple ("CEnone," 1832)— 

to live by law, 
Acting the law we live by without fear; 
And because right is right, to follow right 
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence. 

Here, of course, is the ideal generalization toward 
which all other ethical principles tend; it is the 
highest stage in the development of the moral 
consciousness of men, and it finds its perfect 
embodiment in the character of Arthur, who 
swore his knights to righteousness of life and to a 
system of practical rules for their conduct: 

To reverence the King, as if he were 

Their conscience, and their conscience as their King, 

To break the heathen and uphold the Christ, 

To ride abroad redressing human wrongs, 

To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it, 

To honor his own word as if his God's, 

To lead sweet lives in purest chastity, 

To love one maiden only, cleave to her. 

And worship her by years of noble deeds, 

Until they won her. 

Moreover, like Wordsworth, Tennyson had an 
exalted conception of the sanctity of the domestic 
affections and the relationships of the fireside, a 
regard which in a measure at least is the product 
of his own early life in his father's rectory. Upon 
the sacredness of home life he would maintain, 
says his son, "that the stability and greatness of 



Bearings of Tennyson's Philosophy 141 

a nation largely depend, and one of the secrets of 
his power over mankind was his true joy in the 
family duties and affections."^ The love of the 
husband and wife that grows richer and fuller 
with the lapse of the years, the devotion of parents 
to children, and the sweet affections of childhood 
are the themes which dignify and ennoble all his 
poems of common life; and the field of the com- 
mon affections Tennyson holds in partnership 
only with Wordsworth. Here, as Mr. Aubrey de 
Vere has observed,^ "It was the Humanities and 
the truths underlying them that he sang, and he 
so sang them that any deep-hearted reader was 
made to feel through his far-reaching thought 
that those Humanities are spiritual things, and 
that to touch them is to touch the garment of 
the Divine." Thus "Enoch Arden" (1864) with 
its delightful picture of fireside happiness and the 
sublime heroism of Enoch's self-effacement, "The 
Miller's Daughter" (1832) and "The Gardener's 
Daughter" (1842) with their portrayal of youthful 
love softened in the retrospect and hallowed by 
the passage of long years of happy marriage, 
"Dora" (1842) with its nobly simple story of the 
triumph of affection over anger and self-will, 
"The Princess" (1847) with its glorification of 
the child and of love as the supreme necessity of 

1 Cf. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, vol. i. p, 189. 2 ibid. 



142 Tennyson 

human life — its glorification of noble marriage 
as essential for the completion of manhood 
and womanhood, "The Promise of May" (1882) 
with its scenes of domestic affection and neigh- 
borly regard — all these and many others that 
might be named are charged with that rich 
moral beauty, that deep ethical meaning, which 
has its root far back in the poet's belief, as it is 
presented in "In Memoriam," that love is a 
spiritual passion and no mere affinity of flesh. 

On the other hand, Tennyson observed with 
grave concern the tendencies in modern life that 
undermine the foundations of society by weaken- 
ing the ties of wedlock and defiling the sanctity of 
the home. And he has depicted these conditions 
in his poetry — not, of course, with a conscious 
ethical purpose, but no less with vivid ethical 
effect. In "Edwin Morris" (1840) and "Locksley 
Hall Sixty Years After" (1886) he has presented 
the evil of marriage for wealth and worldly posi- 
tion — "a sin against the truth of love," he calls it 
— particularly in the portrait of the woman who 
jilted a young lover to wed a wealthy dotard: 

She that in her heart is brooding on his briefer lease of Hfe, 
While she vows "till death shall part us," she the would-be- 
widow wife. 

In "The Flight" (1885) his imagination dwells 
upon the anguish of a motherless girl about to be 



Bearings of Tennyson's Philosophy 143 

sacrificed in marriage to a man she hates in 
order to save her father's fortunes from ruin: 

Shall I take him, I kneel with ^:m? I swear and swear 

forsworn 
To love him most, whom most I loathe, to honor whom I 

scorn ? 
The Fiend would yell, the grave would yawn, my mother's 

ghost would rise — 
To lie, to lie — in God's own house — the blackest of all lies! 

In "Aylmer's Field'' (1864) is told the story how 
Sir Aylmer in his pride sacrificed his daughter 
and her lover to '^marriage-hindering mammon." 
"The Wreck" (1885) enforces the principle that 
marriage, even v^here no love is, is an institution 
that cannot be disregarded by the individual who 
grows restless under its bonds — that the duty of 
wifehood and motherhood cannot be put aside even 
to satisfy the claims of another passion. And in 
"The Promise of May" (1882), as has been seen,^ 
the poet has unfolded the dangers to the home and 
to society of those teachings, as defined by Edgar, 
that reduce marriage to an irksome and conven- 
tional bond, the sophistry of the principle that 

If you will bind love to one for ever, 
Altho' at first he take his bonds for flowers, 
As years go on, he feels them press upon him, 
Begins to flutter in them, and at last 
Breaks thro' them, and so flies away for ever; 
While, had you left him free use of his wings, 
Who knows that he had ever dream'd of flying? 
iCf. p. 116. 



144 Tennyson 

But while Tennyson thus clearly saw and 
vivdly presented the evils that threaten society 
through the violation of the home, he observed 
with no less concern the play in individual life and 
in civilization of those petty vices, those mean and 
shameful passions, rooted in selfishness, that are 
more subtle in their influence but no less terrible 
in their effect upon personal and social morality. 
Spite and malice that vent themselves in slander 
and falsehood,^ gossip, "false pride in place and 
blood," "the narrowing lust of gold,'* anger and 
jealousy and hate, hypocrisy — *' the sin that 
neither God nor man can well forgive" — a whole 
cluster of antisocial impulses and vicious moods, 
petty and base — these he has portrayed incident- 
ally in many of his tales and in the "Idylls of the 
King," always with the fervor of one who has a 
keen sense of their corroding and corrupting 
power upon character and conduct. One of the 
most interesting as well as most artistic of these 
stories having a definite ethical drift is "Sea 
Dreams" (1864), in which in connection with a 
charming picture of parental devotion and homely 

^Cf. the words of the cynic in "Maud," IV: 
Below me, there, is the village, and looks how quiet and small ! 
And yet bubbles o'er like a city, with gossip, scandal, and spite; 
And Jack on his ale-house bench has as many lies as a Czar. 

Ah yet, we cannot be kind to each other here for an hour; 

We whisper, and hint, and chuckle, and grin at a brother's shame; 

However we brave it out, we men are a little breed. 



Bearings of Tennyson's Philosophy 145 

afFection the poet has drawn a vivid portrait of 
unctuous and supple-sliding hypocrisy — a por- 
trait colored, it should be observed, by the passion 
of the victim of the scoundrel's rascality — one 
who was 

So false, he partly took himself for true ; 
Whose pious talk, when most his heart was dry, 
Made wet the crafty crowsfoot round his eye ; 
Who, never naming God except for gain, 
So never took that useful name in vain, 
Made Him his catspaw and the Cross his tool, 
And Christ the bait to trap his dupe and fool. 

But the poem also, in the tender solicitude of the 
wife that her husband cease to cherish resentment 
against the man who had robbed him of his slender 
savings, enforces the principle of love and the 
beneficent influences of the Christian doctrine of 
forgiveness upon the character of him who exer- 
cises it. 

It is, however, in *'Maud" and "Locksley Hall 
Sixty Years After," to which reference has already 
been made in these pages, that Tennyson has 
drawn his most severe indictment against the 
evils of modern society — a view of things, observe, 
seen only through the eyes of men jaundiced by 
a cynicism that is not personal to the poet. And 
yet the picture in the main is true in its presen- 
tation of fact, although the critic in each case has 
lacked the poise and sanity of vision essential to 



146 Tennyson 

really effective censure, and fails to see how the 
evil of which he complains is after all counter- 
balanced by a world of good to which he closes 
his eyes. In the main, also, aside from this dra- 
matic coloring, these poems represent the gist of 
Tennyson's own strictures upon the age in which 
he lived, and the remedies he would prescribe for 
its evils. ^ In them he has portrayed all the con- 
tradictions of modern civilization, on the one 
hand the progress of science and the boasted 
refinement of the time, and on the other the 
brutality, the lust, and the greed — 

When the poor are hovel'd and hustled together, each sex, 

Hke swine. 
When only the ledger lives, and when only not all men lie; 

And chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for 
bread, 

as the cynic in "Maud" puts it. One by one the 
aged man in "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After'' 
also enumerates the vices of the day and the 
terrible evils of the established social order: 

peasants maim the helpless horse, and drive 
Innocent cattle under thatch, and burn the kindlier brutes 
alive 1 



1 In this connection it should be recognized that the recommenda- 
tion of war in "Maud" as a cure for the ills of peace is thoroughly 
dramatic, and was suggested by the fact that the poem was written 
"when the cannon was heard booming from the Solent before the 
Crimean war." 



Bearings of Tennyson's Philosophy 147 

Envy wears the mask of Love, and, laughing sober fact to 

scorn, 
Cries to Weakest as to Strongest, "Ye are equals, equal-born;" 

the prostitution of the Press/ that 

Does its best to charm the worst, to lower the rising race 
of men ; 

the pitiful lot of the poor in the cities, that wrings 
from the observer the cry, 

Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the 

Time, 
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime? 

There among the glooming alleys Progress halts on palsied 

feet. 
Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the 

street. 

There the Master scrimps his haggard sempstress of her 

daily bread. 
There a single sordid attic holds the living and the dead. 

There the smoldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted 

floor. 
And the crowded couch of incest in the warrens of the poor. 

All this is true, it is vividly and powerfully 
expressed, and it gains in vividness by its dra- 
matic setting. But, though Tennyson's imagi- 
nation thus seized upon the facts of the case, he 
does not seem to have penetrated into the bitter- 
ness of the lot of the poor nor to have made their 
cries his own. Prescient as he was in catching the 
drift of the thought of the age in regard to matters 

iCf. "The Dawn," III (1892). 



148 Tennyson 

of faith, he did not foresee in an equal degree 
those momentous movements in society which 
even in his own day were working themselves out 
in the amelioration of the social and economic 
ills of the people, and were destined so completely 
to change the social structure of England. Indeed, 
he scarcely seems to have understood them at 
all. "When I see society vicious and the poor 
starving in the great cities," he remarked in 1887, 
"I feel that there is a mighty wave of evil passing 
over the world, but that there will be yet some 
new and strange development, which I shall not 
live to see."^ So it comes about that the entire 
movement for the reform of the grave abuses under 
which the lower classes groaned finds only at 
best an incidental reference in his poetry. There, 
for example, were the chimney-sweeps, little boys 
and girls who were forced by brutal masters to 
climb heated and filthy chimneys at the risk of 
life and limb; there were the children in the 
factories, giving long hours — sometimes thirteen 
out of the twenty-four — to degrading and brutal- 
izing toil; there were the women and children 
in the mines, doing the part of beasts of burden, 
often crawling on hands and knees and dragging 
after them the loaded cars of coal through low 
and narrow galleries where the mules could not 

*Cf. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, vol. ii, p. 337. 



Bearings of Tennyson's Philosophy 149 

make their way: but none of these unspeakable 
atrocities — and only a few have been mentioned 
that in his lifetime were remedied by law — find 
a voice in the poetry of Tennyson. He wrote no 
"Cry of the Children," no "Song of the Shirt," 
nor did he, as did Charles Kingsley in "The 
Poacher's Widow" and Ruskin in his lectures 
and papers, cry out his indignation and prayer 
for vengeance against the oppressor of the pocf 

But while Tennyson thus sustained through 
his poetry no direct relationship with the humani- 
tarian movement as a propaganda, a definite 
program of reform — though as a citizen he pon- 
dered deeply upon all the public questions of 
his day — ^yet he was the great laureate of his 
time in singing the humanitarian principle as an 
influence in society, as a tremendous spiritual 
force toward political and social justice and 
practical philanthropy — he was ever the singer of 
"sweeter manners, purer laws," of "nobler modes 
of life," of "the love of truth and right," and ''the 
common love of good." And this is no ordinary 
or insignificant service. 

Moreover, the great principle of Tennyson's 
social ethics is the necessary brotherhood of man 
and the practice of its precepts in the individual 
life. It is also the animating spirit of the philan- 
thropy of the time, the burden of the preaching 



150 Tennyson 

of Maurice and Kingsley and of the writings of 
Carlyle and Ruskin. "In vain thou deniest it," 
exclaims Carlyle in Sartor Resartus, "thou art 
my brother!" And Kingsley in his sermon on 
the message of the church to the laboring man, 
in 1851,^ said, "I assert that the business for 
which God sends a Christian priest in a Christian 
nation is, to preach freedom, equality, and broth- 
erhood in the fullest, deepest, widest meaning 
of those three great words." In the preface to 
Alton Locke (1850) he further defines his use 
of the term brotherhood by saying that he has 
used it in that sense according to which "a man 
believes that all men are his brothers, not by the 
will of the flesh, or the will of man, but by the 
will of God, whose children they all are alike." 
Thus, also, Tennyson sings, enforcing not only 
the principle but the duty of its practice by all 
men individually and collectively. The aged 
grandsire, for example, speaking to his grandson 
in "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," urges him 
to meet the new responsibilities he is about to 
assume as the "latest Lord of Locksley Hall" by 
imitating the example of his predecessor and 
caring for the welfare of his tenants: 



'A sermon which created a considerable stir in England and was 
denounced immediately after its delivery by the incumbent in whose 
church it had been delivered and at whose invitation it was preached. 
Cf. Charles Kingsley; His Letters and Memories of His Life, p. 156. 



Bearings of Tennyson's Philosophy 151 

You, my Leonard, use and not abuse your day. 
Move among your people, know them, follow him who led 
the way, 

Strove for sixty widow'd years to help his homelier brother 

men. 
Served the poor, and built the cottage, raised the school, and 

drain 'd the fen. 

In the "Ode Sung at the Opening of the Inter- 
national Exhibition" (1862), again he dreams of 
the time and the state when each man shall 

find his own in all men's good, 
And all men work in noble brotherhood. 

This, too, is the hope of Leonard's song in "The 
Golden Year," first published in 1846: 

Ah! when shall all men's good 
Be each man's rule, and universal Peace 
Lie like a shaft of light across the land, 
And like a lane of beams athwart the sea, 
Thro' all the circle of the golden year? 

So he dreams of the time 

When wealth no more shall rest in mounded heaps. 

But smit with freer light shall slowly melt 

In many streams to fatten lower lands. 

And light shall spread, and man be liker man 

Thro' all the season of the golden year. 

Far off the goal might be, "how far no tongue 
can say"; but, as the poet puts it in "The Prin- 
cess," "wildest dreams are but the needful preludes 
of the truth," and he was secure always in his 
confidence in the final working out through time 



152 Tennyson 

of the great cosmic principle of Love that should 
usher in "the closing cycle rich in good," of which 
he sings in "In Memoriam." That there would 
be periods of advance in human history, followed 
by periods of reaction when men would seem to 
move backward, the poet foresaw. " The truth 
is," he said, "the wave advances and recedes"; 
and this he tried to express in the "Idylls" and 
the need of an ideal; but he never feared, except 
in temporary moods of depression, for the ulti- 
mate working out of all things for the good of 
men. Behind the storm of politics and the tur- 
moil of society he ever heard "a deeper voice 
across the storm," 

Proclaiming social truth shall spread, 
And justice. 

It is this hope and faith that "Love will conquer 
at the last," that sustains and encourages the 
old man of "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After" 
as he surveys the ruined hopes of his youth and 
finds their goal still so far away: 

Only That which made us, meant us to be mightier by and by, 
Set the sphere of all the boundless Heavens within the 
human eye. 

Sent the shadow of Himself, the boundless, thro' the human 

soul ; 
Boundless inward, in the atom, boundless outward, in the 

Whole. 



Bearings of Tennyson's Philosophy 153 

But splendid as were Tennyson's visions of the 
fulfillment of the divine purposes for the race in 
that nobler civilization of which he sings, the 
substance of his ethical service was something 
more than a dream 

of what the world will be 
When the years have died away. 

If he did not arouse the civic conscience of his 
age to the bitter enormities of the social order, he 
nevertheless sternly put upon the conscience of the 
individual the duty of personal obedience to the 
law of brotherhood and the service of love, and the 
duty of personal devotion, likewise, to the prin- 
ciples of right and justice. When Leonard had 
sung his song of "The Golden Year," old James, 
"full of force and choler" and of the sense of 
obligation to the present, rebuked him sharply, 
saying: 

"What stuff is this! 
Old writers push'd the happy season back, — 
The more fools they, — we forward : dreamers both : 
You most, that in an age, when every hour 
Must sweat her sixty minutes to the death. 
Live on, God love us, as if the seedsman, rapt 
Upon the teeming harvest, should not plunge 
His hand into the bag: but well I know 
That unto him who works, and feels he works. 
This same grand year is ever at the doors." 

For the idle rich he had ever the same counsel of 



154 Tennyson 

service, as it is given in "Lady Clara Vere de Vera" 

(1832): 

Are there no beggars at your gate, 
Nor any poor about your lands? 

Oh! teach the orphan boy to read, 
Or teach the orphan girl to sew, 

Pray heaven for a human heart. 

Similarly, for whatever doubt men might have 
concerning themselves, concerning God, and the 
world, Tennyson again urges the principle of love 
for one's fellow men and loyal service as a sure 
and quick release. Thus the Ancient Sage con- 
cludes his colloquy with the young materialist by 
bidding him. 

Let be thy wail, and help thy fellow men, 
And make thy gold thy vassal, not thy king. 
And fling free alms into the beggar's bowl, 
And send the day into the darken'd heart. 

Finally, in the enforcement of this principle of 
service in the spirit of brotherhood and personal 
duty, the aged colloquist of Locksley Hall admon- 
ishes his grandson in words that are the ultimate 
admonition of Tennyson likewise to the age : 

Follow you the Star that lights a desert pathway, yours or 

mine. 
Forward, till you see the highest Human Nature is divine. 
Follow Light, and do the Right — for man can half control 

his doom — 
Till you find the deathless Angel seated in the vacant tomb, — 

the practical embodiment of the sum of the poet's 
ethical and religious teachings. 



CHAPTER V 

THE SPIRITUAL SYMBOLISM OF THE "IDYLLS OF 
THE KING" 

The "Idylls of the King," in their imaginative 
beauty, their rich and varied spiritual significa- 
tion, are the supreme achievement of Tennyson's 
art. Upon them he lavished a wealth of poetic 
energy during upwards of a half-century, and into 
them he drew all the complex threads, the mani- 
fold implications of his thought and feeling upon 
the deepest and most important things of life, 
weaving them all together into the splendid fab- 
ric of the story of King Arthur. "They give his 
innermost being," remarked his son, "more fully, 
though not more truly, than Tn Memoriam.' " 
Under the images and incidents of these ancient 
legends, indeed, the poet has expressed all that 
is most characteristic and significant of his 
spiritual philosophy as it developed during the 
course of his life, and as it has been expressed 
in particular in the poems already examined 
— poems which in turn become an infallible 
medium for the interpretation of the embodi- 
ment of spiritual truth in the **Idylls" them- 
selves. 



156 Tennyson 

Written at intervals through many years, in an 
order quite other than that in which they stand 
in the completed cycle, and in accordance with 
no definite allegorical scheme or spiritual motive 
that asserted itself at the beginning and deter- 
mined their treatment throughout, the "Idylls" 
vary greatly, both in the quality and in the signifi- 
cance of their inward meaning, and in the degree 
with which they are severally charged by it.* 
Some of them — notably those of the first group, 
which consisted of "Enid," "Elaine," "Vivien," 
and "Guinevere" — lend themselves only feebly 
and by a sort of sympathetic assimilation from 
the others to the general theme that is found 
beneath the series as a whole. 

It was, indeed, only with the composition of the 
"Idylls" of the second group, published in 1869 — 
"The Coming of Arthur," "The Holy Grail," 
"Pelleas and Ettarre," and "The Passing of 
Arthur" — that, by an art as rare as it is lovely? 
the forms and figures of the ancient romance 



^As early as 1830 Tennyson wrote out a prose memorandum of the 
allegory as he then had it in mind, but which he did not follow when 
he came to write. Most of the early experiments with the Arthurian 
legends in verse are implicit with one or another principle of moral 
or spiritual truth, as "The Lady of Shalott" (1832) and "Morte 
d' Arthur" (1842). The early lyric of "Sir Launcelot and Queen 
Guinevere," however, written in part at least in 1830 but not pub- 
lished until 1 84 2, is only a delightful fancy of youth and love and 
springtime happiness. In 1857 "Enid and Nimue " (an early form 
of "Enid" and "Vivien") was printed for private circulation under 
the subtitle of "The True and the False," which was also retained 
in a first proof of the first group in 1859. 



Idylls of the King 157 

became penetrated, shot through and through by 
the glancing lights, the gleams and colors, of a 
beautiful and significant symbolism. This was 
the period of the poet's life, it will be remembered, 
when his high philosophical idealism, his faith in 
the reality of the unseen, enlarged itself upon his 
consciousness through the imaginative far more 
than through the logical faculty, with growing 
certitude in the face of whatever denials the 
antagonistic system of thought might urge— an 
idealism that in all its subtle significations and 
mystic meanings may express itself alone through 
the language of the imagination, through the 
symbolism of tale and legend and the suggestion 
of an inward truth by concrete image and poetic 
phrase. So it comes about, as was said of 
another poem full of ideal truth, that 

Here what thought can never reach to 

Is by semblances made known : 
What man's word may never utter, 

Done in act — in symbol shown. 

The spiritual principle thus introduced permeates 
the "Idylls" that were written later— "The Last 
Tournament" (1871), "Gareth and Lynette" 
(1872), and "Balin and Balan," written about 
the same time though not published until 1885. 
And it also seems to have prompted the lines 



158 Tennyson 

**To the Queen" (1872), in which the poet prays 
her to 

accept this old imperfect tale, 
New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul, 
Ideal manhood closed in real man,^ 
Rather than that gray king whose name, a ghost. 
Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak, 
And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still. 

And yet, clearly as a spiritual motive thus 
colors the story, it must be borne in mind that 
with the exception of a few isolated passages 
there is no formal or definite allegory in the 
"Idylls of the King/' Indeed, as the poet him- 
self remarked, "there is no single fact or incident 
in the *Idylls,' however seemingly mystical, which 
may not be explained as without any mystery or 
allegory whatever." In thus maintaining his 
imaginative freedom from the limitations of a 
consciously didactic purpose, he was, of course, 
only observing the laws of the highest and pur- 
est art. "I hate to be tied down to say ^This 
means that,' " he was accustomed to say, "because 
the thought within the image is much more than 
any one interpretation." The "Idylls," therefore, 
must not be submitted to the scrutiny of the 
logical faculty — in the reading they continually 

^It is interesting to observe, in connection with the allegorical 
principle of the "Idylls," that this line was inserted by Tennyson in 
189 1, because he thought that he had perhaps not made the real 
humanity of the King sufficiently clear. See Alfred, Lord Tennyson: 
A Memoir, vol. ii, p. 129. 



Idylls of the King 159 

escape as poetry from whatever limitations of 
interpretation a formal exposition of their mean- 
ing would place upon them; the inward truth of 
their images, that rich, significant, and ever-un- 
folding symbolism flickers and fades and flashes 
through the figures and incidents of the tale like 
the Royal Mount of Arthur to the astonished gaze 
of Gareth and his men when first they stood in 
view of it, now clear, now obscured and hidden in 
the mist, now lost altogether, and again appear- 
ing in definiteness of outline and mystic beauty. 

In the light of this principle, "The Coming of 
Arthur," whatever else it may betoken — and it 
unfolds many intimations of spiritual truth — 
becomes as it were a twofold parable of the 
mystery of soul, a concrete embodiment of the 
poet's sense of the mystic source of the spiritual 
nature, as that has already been expressed in 
"The Two Greetings,"' and of the processes 
whereby it vindicates itself to the individual con- 
sciousness as king and master over flesh. This 
is the twofold thread of symbolism which runs 
like a strand of gold through the entire fabric of 
the "Idyll," dominating its figures and situations 
at times, and again appearing only in an inci- 
dental way in its warp, and as a hidden suggestion 
of spiritual truth, but centering always about the 

»Cf. p. 88. 



i6o Tennyson 

the King, mystery of his birth, and the reaHty of 
his kinglihood. 

"Who is this Arthur," asked the lords and 
barons of the realm among themselves, "that he 
should rule over us ?" For there was doubt and 
question concerning his parentage — whether he 
was the son of Uther and born before his time, 
or the son of Gorlois and Ygerne, or whether the 
son of Anton, or perchance baseborn^ — ^just as 
ever there is doubt concerning man, his spiritual 
origin, or whether he be born of flesh alone like 
the brute, and question concerning the authority 
of soul over the lusts of life. 

Some there were of Uther's peerage who hated 
Arthur in their hearts ^'because his ways were 
sweet and theirs were bestial," and who accord- 
ingly rejected his authority — a type of certain spir- 
itual degeneration. But others who had taken 
his vows and served him on the field of strife 
knew him indeed as King by right divine. Of 



' In Malory the story is told that Uther loved Ygerne, the wife of 
Gorlois, but "she would not assent." Then through the magic of 
Merlin he disguised himself as Gorlois and visited her on the night 
when her husband was slain. Later he married Ygerne, and when 
she confessed to him that she did not know whether he or Gorlois 
was the father of the child she was about to bear, he revealed to her 
the deception. "Then the Queen made great joy when she knew 
who was the father of her child." But Merlin required the child 
to be given at birth to Sir Ector to rear. "And when the child is 
born," he charged them, "let it be delivered unto me at yonder privy 
postern unchristened." Cf. Morte d' Arthur, chaps. I-III. Out of 
this coarse and rude material, a version of which is given by Bedivere 
in the poem, Tennyson fashioned the beautiful symbolism of "The 
Coming of Arthur." 



Idylls of the King i6i 

such was Lancelot, who interchanged with Arthur 
on the "field of death a deathless love." 

*'Thou dost not doubt me King, 
So well thine arm hath fought for me to-day," 

said Arthur to him; 

"Sir and my liege," he cried, "the fire of God 
Descends upon thee in the battlefield : 
I know thee for my King!" 

Of such, too, were Ulfius, Brastias, and Bedivere, 
forthright and blunt in faith and service, brave 
men who listened to no slander touching their 
King, but followed him in simple loyalty of heart 
— they also being types with Lancelot of various 
modes of faith. Of such, also, was Bellicent, 
more spiritual by nature than the rest, of closer 
kin to Arthur — men reputed her, indeed, to be 
his sister — and more mystical, to whom were 
granted " strange, mysterious, unreasoned, and 
immediate assurances " of his royal right to rule 
his followers. She saw him on the day when 
Uther's peerage fled; had heard his warriors at 
his coronation swear to work his will; had 
heard the King when he 

in low deep tones, 
And simple words of great authority, 
Bound them by so straight vows to his own self, 
That when they rose, knighted from kneeling, some 
Were pale as at the passing of a ghost, 
Some fltish'd, and others dazed, as one who wakes 
Half -blinded at the coming of a light ; 



i62 Tennyson 

had heard him, too, cheer his followers with 
"large, divine, and comfortable words," and even 
as he spoke had seen 

From eye to eye thro' all their Order flash 
A momentary likeness of the King — 

signifying, as it would seem, the compelling 
power of the ideal to mold men to its own like- 
ness, even as John declared, "It doth not yet 
appear what we shall be: but we know that, 
when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for 
we shall see him as he is." And in the uplift 
of the vision, she observed that 

ere it left their faces, thro' the cross 
And those around it and the Crucified, 
Down from the casement over Arthtir, smote 
Flame-color, vert and azure, in three rays, 
One falling upon each of three fair queens. 
Who stood in silence near his throne, the friends 
Of Arthur, gazing on him, tall, with bright 
Sweet faces, who will help him at his need.* 

Thus as the poet comes to deal with the 
more mystical of religious experiences and to 
meditate upon the spiritual presences that attend 
the soul in its warfare with the things of flesh, 

' When Tennyson was asked whether these three queens were not 
Faith, Hope, and Charity, he replied: "They mean that and they 
do not. They are three of the noblest of women. They are also 
those three Graces, but they are much more I hate to be tied down 
to say ' This raeans that,' because the thought within the image is 
much more than any one interpretation." Cf. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: 
A Memoir, vol. ii, p. 127. 



Idylls of the King 163 

the symbolism passes into allegory. By the side 
of Arthur stands all earthly wisdom, typified in 
"mage Merlin, whose vast wit and hundred 
winters" are utterly at the service of the King. 
And near him stands the gigantic figure of Reli- 
gion herself, the Lady of the Lake, a cloud of 
prayer and worship about her, and her face half- 
hidden in the gloom of churchly institutions, 
centuries old ; quiet and unchanged amid the 
turmoil and strife of men, she gave the King 
his power to war with evil: 

She gave the King his huge cross-hilted sword, 
Whereby to drive the heathen out : a mist 
Of incense curl'd about her, and her face 
Well-nigh was hidden in the minster gloom; 
But there was heard among the holy hymns 
A voice as of the waters, for she dwells 
Down in a deep; calm, whatsoever storms 
May shake the world, and when the surface rolls 
Hath power to walk the waters like our Lord. 

While these, however, believed according to 
their sight, and others disbelieved because their 
hearts were base, Leodogran represents a differ- 
ent mode — he stood in doubt until the truth 
manifested itself to his consciousness through 
the valid processes of his own deep personal expe- 
rience, when amid the passing away of earthly 
things he came to a vivid sense of the reality and 
permanence of spirit. Uncertain whether he 



164 Tennyson 

should acknowledge Arthur King by right, he 
pondered doubting all that Bellicent and the 
rest had said concerning him, until he fell asleep 
and dreamed a dream that resolved his doubts 
forever. For in his dream he saw a peak, hidden 
in a haze, whereon there sat a phantom king, 
*'now looming, and now lost," who sent out at 
times a voice to those who fought upon the slope 
beside him. Here and there stood one who 
pointed toward the voice; but others cried, 

"No king of ours, 
No son of Uther, and no king of ours." 

Then on a sudden his dream was changed, 

the haze 
Descended, and the solid earth became 
As nothing, but the King stood out in heaven, 
Crown 'd. 

On the other hand, the tale of Arthur's "com- 
ing," as told by Bleys to Bellicent and by her 
retold to King Leodogran, beautifully figures 
under the forms of the imagination the coming of 
the individual out of the nascent into the finite 
conditions of this sentient and mortal estate, 
while the riddling words of Merlin declare the 
essential mystery of the source and origin of the 
soul. To express the same truths Carlyle in 
Sartor Resartus has conceived the story of the 



Idylls of the King 165 

close-muffled and mysterious stranger who, enter- 
ing an "umbrageous Man's-nest, one meek yellow 
evening or dusk," deposited upon the table before 
the astonished house-mates a basket overhung 
with green silk in which in softest sleep there 
lay a Httle red-colored Infant, and then as 
silently withdrew. So the tale of Bleys — he 
told how on the night of Uther's death, 

a night 
In which the bounds of heaven and earth were lost, 

he and Merlin left the castle, and passing down 

to the sea 

Beheld, so high upon the dreary deeps 

It seem'd in heaven, a ship, the shape thereof 

A dragon wing'd, and all from stem to stem 

Bright with a shining people on the decks, 

And gone as soon as seen. And then the two 

Dropt to the cove, and watch'd the great sea fall. 

Wave after wave, each mightier than the last, 

Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep 

And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged 

Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame: 

And down the wave and in the flame was borne 

A naked babe, and rode to Merlin's feet, 

Who stoopt and caught the babe, and cried, "The King! 

Here is an heir for Uther!" And the fringe 

Of that great breaker, sweeping up the strand, 

Lash'd at the wizard as he spake the word, 

And all at once all round him rose in fire. 

So that the child and he were clothed in fire. 

And presently thereafter foUow'd calm, 

Free sky and stars: "And this same child," he said, 

"Is he who reigns; nor could I part in peace 

Till this were told." 



1 66 Tennyson 

Later, when Bellicent in her perplexity and 
ignorance asked Merlin whether "these things 
were truth," he laughed and answered her "in 
riddling triplets of old time" that put her to 
perplexity again: 

"Rain, rain, and sun! a rainbow in the sky! 
A young man will be wiser by and by; 
An old man's wit may wander ere he die. 

"Rain, rain, and sun! a rainbow on the lea! 
And truth is this to me, and that to thee; 
And truth or clothed or naked let it be. 

"Rain, sun, and rain! and the free blossom blows: 
Sun, rain, and sun! and where is he who knows? 
From the great deep to the great deep he goes."* 

It is, however, in "The Holy Grail" — a poem 
which Tennyson for a long time scrupled to 
undertake because he feared he might profane a 
sacred theme with unholy touch — that the pure 
spirituality of the poet's philosophy and the 
ideality of his imagination effect the most perfect 
unity of conception. In this point of view it is 
the finest of all the "Idylls," the crowning 
achievement of his art.^ Seizing upon the 

^" Birth is a mystery and death is a mystery," said Tennyson, 
"and in the midst lies the table-land of life, with its struggles and 
performances." Cf. Alfred, Lord Tennyson : A Memoir, vol. ii, p. 127. 
See also "The Two Greetings." "The Passing of Arthur," in which 
the poet has given a finely imaginative presentment of the mystery 
of death under the image of Arthur embarking on the sea, and 
"Crossing the Bar" 

2" 'The Holy Grail' seems to me to express most my father's 
highest self," says the poet's son. "Perhaps this is because I saw 



Idylls of the King 167 

legend of the Grail — 

the cup itself from which our Lord 
Drank at the last sad supper with his own, 

and which was brought by Joseph of Arimathea 
to Glastonbury (where still, according to the tale, 
the winter thorn blossoms at Christmas in 
memory of Him), but lost again because of 
human sin — seizing upon this legend and polar- 
izing it with the white light of his faith in the 
reality of the unseen, Tennyson makes the Grail 
in his handling a symbol of those things which 
mortal eye hath not beheld, but which announce 
themselves to the consciousness of men through 
vision alone and spiritual discovery. And the 
Quest for the Grail, undertaken by the Knights 
in knightly service, becomes in turn symbolic of 
that other and higher Quest whereon the soul of 
man in every age and under every variety of 



him in the writing of this poem more than in the writing of any other, 
with that far-away rapt look on his face, which he had whenever he 
worked at a story that touched him greatly, or because I vividly 
recall the inspired way in vv^hich he chanted to us different parts of 
the poem as they were composed." Cf. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A 
Memoir, vol. ii, p. 92. The poet also has remarked: "'The Holy 
Grail' is one of the most imaginative of my poems. I have expressed 
there my strong feeling of the Reality of the Unseen. The end, when 
the king speaks of his work and of his visions, is intended to be the 
summing up of all in the highest note by the highest of human men. 
These three lines in Arthur's speech are the (spiritually) central lines 
of the Idylls' 

In moments when he feels he cannot die, 
And knows himself no vision to himself. 
Nor the high God a vision." 
Cf. ibid., p. 90. 



i68 Tennyson 

spiritual need and earthly circumstance has 
entered to achieve the glories of that 

true world within the world we see, 
Whereof our world is but the bounding shore. 

Of these there are several types presented in 
this poem/ The first of those in Arthur's realm 
to see the Grail was Percivale's sister, the Nun, 

A holy maid; tho' never maiden glow'd, 
But that was in her earlier maidenhood, 
With such a fervent flame of human love. 

Her passion being rudely blunted turned to holy 
things, and passing into the silent life of fast 
and almsdeed, of prayer and praise, she purged 
herself of every earthly taint, 

till the sun 
Shone, and the wind blew, thro' her. 

And when the sin broke out in Arthur's court 
she prayed and fasted more, in hope that thereby 
she might bring back again the Grail to cleanse 
the realm of Arthur. At length to her in utter 
purity there came at dead of night a sound of 

^"He pointed out the difference between the five visions of the 
Grail, as seen by the Holy Nun, Sir Galahad, Sir Percivale, Sir Lance- 
lot, Sir Bors, according to their different, their own peculiar natures 
and circumstances. He dwelt on the mystical treatment of every 
part of the subject, and said the key is to be found in a careful read- 
ing of Sir Percivale's vision and subsequent fall and nineteenth cen- 
tury temptations." Cf. Memoir, vol. ii, p. 63 In the light of this 
statement, and of the references in other poems to the various 
conditions that obscure the clearness of the spiritual vision, it would 
seem that sorae interpretations of the " Idyll" have made too much 
of the opposition between superstition and true faith as the primary 
theme of the poem. 



Idylls of the King 169 

heavenly music, as of a silver horn blow^n far 
across the hills. And while she lay listening a 
cold and silver beam filled all her cell with light, 

And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail, 

Rose-red with beatings in it, as if alive, 

Till all the white walls of her cell were dyed 

With rosy colors leaping on the wall; 

And then the music faded, and the Grail 

Past, and the beam decay'd, and from the walls 

The rosy quiverings died into the night. 

Thus the Holy Nun attained the vision — as it is 
written, "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they 
shall see God." 

So, also, Galahad, who ever went among the 
knights in the white armor of knightly purity — 
the youngest who was made a knight of Arthur: 
when he heard the story of the maiden's vision, 

** His eyes became so like her own, they seem'd 
Hers, and himself her brother more than I," 

as Percivale declared, symbolizing the spiritual 
kinship that binds those together who are pure in 
heart and life. She wove for him a sword-belt of 
her hair and within, in crimson thread and silver, 
a crimson grail within a silver beam, and sent him 
forth to see the vision for himself. And on a 
night when all the chivalry of Arthur sat at 
table, he threw himself into the Siege Perilous of 
Merlin wherein 

No man could sit but he should lose himself; 



1 70 Tennyson 

but Galahad cried, "If I lose myself, I save my- 
self!" Then all at once was heard 

A cracking and a riving of the roofs, 

And rending, and a blast, and overhead 

Thunder, and in the thunder was a cry. 

And in the blast there smote along the hall 

A beam of light seven times more clear than day: 

And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail 

All over cover' d with a luminous cloud, 

And none might see who bare it, and it past. 

But Galahad saw it, and he heard a cry, "O 
Galahad, and O Galahad, follow me!" And in 
the strength of his vision he went about redressing 
human wrongs and shattering evil customs every- 
where, until he passed far into the spiritual city. 
Thus he attained in purity of life and through 
the act of utter self-effacement, the vision itself 
being colored by the vigor of his real humanity. 
For wherever he journeyed the Grail attended 
him. 

Fainter by day, but always in the night 
Blood-red, and sliding down the blacken'd marsh 
Blood-red, and on the naked mountain top 
Blood-red, and in the sleeping mere below 
Blood-red. 

It is, however, in the story of Sir Percivale's 
Quest, his temptations, and fall, as Tennyson has 
suggested, that the richest intimations of spir- 
itual truth are to be found. For Percivale in his 
frailty and his struggles is a type of a common 
experience. 



Idylls of the King 171 

He swore to ride a twelvemonth and a day, if 
so be he might attain the vision which his sister 
saw, and Galahad. Lifted up in spiritual pride 
because of his vow, he went away upon his Quest. 
Never yet had the sky appeared so blue or the 
earth so fair, and he thought surely he should 
find the Grail. But as he rode doubts began to 
overwhelm him; and all the evil he had ever done 
or thought came back in memory to plague him 
and persuade him that the Holy Quest was not 
for him. And so he fell into distress, coming unto 
a land of sand and thorns, alone, where he was 
thirsty unto death. And when he thought his 
thirst would slay him, he 

saw deep lawns, and then a brook, 
With one sharp rapid, where the crisping white 
Play'd ever back upon the sloping wave, 
And took both ear and eye ; and o'er the brook 
Were apple-trees, and apples by the brook 
Fallen, and on the lawns, — 

then the water and the apples allured him from 
his Quest. But even as he stooped to drink and 
tasted of the apples, 

all these things at once 
Fell into dust, 

and he found himself again alone and thirsting 
in a land of sand and thorns. 

Thence he pursued his way again until he came 
to a cottage before which a woman sat spinning. 



172 Tennyson 

Innocent and kind and gracious was she; but when 
she rose to greet him and he touched her, lo! she, 
too, fell into dust and nothing, 

and the house 
Became no better than a broken shed, 
And in it a dead babe; and also this 
Fell into dust, and he was left alone. 

Then as he rode his thirst increased; until there 
fell across his path a yellow gleam, and he saw 
that 

where it smote the plowshare in the field, 
The plowman left his plowing, and fell down 
Before it; and where it glitter'd on her pail, 
The milkmaid left her milking, and fell down 
Before it. 

Looking, he saw the light proceeded from One 
who seemed "the Lord of all the World," riding 
in golden armor on a golden-armored steed. And 
when he thought the knight would crush him, 
lo! the horse and rider fell into dust at his touch, 
and he was left alone once more and thirsting in 
a land of sand and thorns. 

Riding further, he came at length to the foot 
of a hill, whereon the walls and towers of a 
mighty city pierced the sky; and by the gateway 
thronged the populace, who shouted words of wel- 
come to him as he climbed. But when he reached 
the top he found the city desolate, and within it 
Only one man of an exceeding age. 



Idylls of the King 173 

who even as he tried to speak in answer to his 
question fell into dust and disappeared, and 
Percivale again was left alone and cried, 

"Lo, if I find the Holy Grail itself 
And touch it, it will crumble into dust." 

Wan and meager, he came after many wander- 
ings to a town with one fair castle in the midst. 
Here maidens met him, each as fair as any flower, 
who disarmed him and led him to their Queen. 
And she, he found, was the one woman who in all 
his life had made his heart leap with love — but 
that was when he 

moved of old 
A slender page about her father's hall. 

Every day she set before him a banquet richer 
than the day before; and off^ered him at length 
her land, her wealth, and state, and her sweet 
self in marriage. So the Quest faded in his 
heart until one night his vow burned within 
him, and he arose and fled, hating himself and 
even the Holy Quest, and all but her. 

Then he dropped into a lowly vale in which a 
chapel stood; and to the priest within he told 
the story of his wanderings, his Quest, and his 
failure. But the holy man admonished him that 
lacking true humility he should not see the Grail; 
that except he should lose himself to save himself, 
as Galahad, his search were all in vain. Even 



174 Tennyson 

while they talked together Galahad entered, clad 
in silver armor; when they knelt before the 
altar the hermit slaked his burning thirst, but at 
the "sacring of the mass'' Galahad saw the face 
as of a child smite itself into the bread. And 
when they rose Sir Galahad announced himself 
about to pass far into the spiritual city to be 

crowned; 

"and come thou, too," 

he said to Percivale, 

"For thou shalt see the vision when I go." 

So out they passed as day began to wane; they 
climbed a hill, says Percivale — and the passage 
is so fine in its imaginative picture of the passing 
of a human soul into the mystery of the other 
world and so rich in symbolism that I venture to 
quote it at length — they climbed a hill 

Scarr'd with a hundred wintry water-courses — 
Storm at the top, and when we gain'd it, storm 
Round us and death ; for every moment glanced 
His silver arms and gloom'd : so quick and thick 
The lightnings here and there to left and right 
Struck, till the dry old trvmks about us, dead, 
Yea, rotted with a hundred years of death, 
Sprang into fire : and at the base we found 
On either hand, as far as eye could see, 
A great black swamp and of an evil smell, 
Part black, part whiten'd with the bones of men. 
Not to be crost, save that some ancient king 
Had built a way, where, link'd with many a bridge, 
A thousand piers ran into the great Sea. 



Idylls of the King 175 

And Galahad fled along them bridge by bridge, 
And every bridge as quickly as he crost 
Sprang into fire and vanish'd, tho' I yeam'd 
To follow; and thrice above him all the heavens 
Open'd and blazed with thunder such as seem'd 
Shoutings of all the sons of God : and first 
At once I saw him far on the great Sea, 
In silver-shining armor starry-clear; 
And o'er his head the Holy Vessel hung 
Clothed in white samite or a luminous cloud. 
And with exceeding swiftness ran the boat, 
If boat it were — I saw not whence it came. 
And when the heavens open'd and blazed again 
Roaring, I saw him like a silver star — 
And had he set the sail, or had the boat 
Become a living creature clad with wings? 
And o'er his head the Holy Vessel hung 
Redder than any rose, a joy to me, 
For now I knew the veil had been withdrawn. 
Then in a moment when they blazed again 
Opening, I saw the least of little stars 
Down on the waste, and straight beyond the star 
I saw the spiritual city and all her spires 
And gateways in a glory like one pearl — 
No larger, tho' the goal of all the saints — 
Strike from the sea; and from the star there shot 
A rose-red sparkle to the city, and there 
Dwelt, and I knew it was the Holy Grail, 
Which never eyes on earth again shall see. 

It was thus in the passing of Galahad that Sir 
Percivale attained his vision, but afar off and 
opening on his eyes the eternal splendors of the 
spiritual city. 

But what, it will be asked, is the mystic meaning 
of his deviation from the way, his burning thirst, 
the water that fled his lips, and all the fond 



176 Tennyson 

delights that turned to dust within his grasp ? 
Is it not that the enticements of the flesh, the 
luxuries of life, even the happiness of the fireside 
and the innocence of love, the vain pomp and 
glory of the v^orld, dominion and kingly pov^er — 
yea, all of them together in one sweet and holy 
joy — prevent at times the quest for higher things ? 
that these are all but dust and ashes to him 
who thirsts and hungers for the things of 
spirit ? and that whoso forsaketh not all he hath 
— father, and mother, and all the dearest things 
of life — shall never attain the treasures of heav- 
enly wisdom ? 

Another Knight who went upon the Quest was 
blunt Sir Bors, who had been content not to have 
seen the Grail, if thereby Lancelot might have 
seen and been healed of his madness. He rode 
with small adventure until he came among a 
strange people who mocked him and the Quest, 
sun-worshipers, who said he followed a wander- 
ing fire and asked what other fire there was 
than he. 

Whereby the blood beats, and the blossom blows, 
And the sea rolls, and all the world is warm'd? 

Then they threw him into prison, where on a 
night a miracle was wrought for him — the stones 
of his cell slipped apart, he saw the stars of 



Idylls of the King 177 

Arthur's Table Round, and then across the seven 
clear stars, 

In color like the fingers of a hand 
Before a burning taper, the sweet Grail 
Glided and past, and close upon it peal'd 
A sharp quick thunder. 

So through persecution for his faith and utter 
self-denial he saw the vision. 

Next there was Lancelot, sin-tormented, and 
pursued by the wild beasts of his own mind. He 
loved his sin though loathing it, and undertook 
the Quest if so be he might be rescued from his 
sin through the vision of the Grail. But a most 
holy man to whom he told his hope admonished 
him that, saving he could first uproot the evil from 
his heart, he should never see the Holy Cup. And 
while he wrestled with himself a madness came 
upon him and drove him to the sea, where such 
a blast began to blow, 

So loud a blast along the shore and sea 
Ye could not hear the waters for the blast, 
Tho' heap'd in mounds and ridges all the sea 
Drove like a cataract, and all the sand 
Swept like a river, and the clouded heavens 
Were shaken with the motion and the sound. 

Here he found a boat rocking in the surge, and 
leaping in he cried, 

"I will embark and I will lose myself, 
And in the great sea wash away my sin." 



178 Tennyson 

For seven days the boat drove over the deep, 
and on the seventh night he heard the keel grate 
on the shingle, while before him rose 

the enchanted towers of Carbonek, 
A castle like a rock upon a rock. 

A lion stood on either side the entry — the lions 

of doubt and spiritual dismay — and as he passed 

they gripped him by the shoulder. But he heard 

a voice, 

"Doubt not, go forward; if thou doubt, the beasts 
"Will tear thee piecemeal." 

So pressing on he came into the great hall of the 
castle — to use again his ov^n words — 

But nothing in the sounding hall I saw, 
No bench nor table, painting on the wall 
Or shield of knight ; only the rounded moon 
Thro' the tall oriel on the rolling sea. 

But far above, clear-toned as a lark, a voice 
was singing; up he climbed a thousand steps of 
penance, with pain like one who climbs in a 
dream. He reached a door — 

A light was in the crannies, and I heard, 
"Glory and joy and honor to our Lord 
And to the Holy Vessel of the Grail." 
Then in my madness I essay 'd the door; 
It gave; and thro' a stormy glare, a heat 
As from a seven-time^^-heated furnace, I, 
Blasted and burnt, and blinded as I was. 
With such a fierceness that I swoon 'd away — 



Idylls of the King 179 

O, yet methought I saw the Holy Grail, 
All pall'd in crimson samite, and around 
Great angels, awful shapes, and wings, and eyes. 
And but for all my madness and my sin, 
And then my swooning, I had sworn I saw 
That which I saw; but what I saw was veil'd 
And cover'd; and this Quest was not for me. 

For Lancelot had not yet purged himself 
through faith and true repentance of his sin. 
Therefore was he stricken bhnd and blasted by 
the holy mysteries upon which he dared to look. 
As it is written, that whosoever approaches holy 
things, having his uncleanness upon him, unto 
him "the Lord will come with fire and with 
chariots like a whirlwind to render his anger 
with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire." 

Gawain also went upon the Quest, an idle and 
world-loving youth. Indeed, he had sworn the 
loudest when the others took their vows; not 
because, however, he had any real desire to see 
the Grail, but because the rest had sworn and he 
would not be lacking. Having no spiritual pro- 
pulsion to the search for holy things, he lost his 
interest quickly; and coming to a silk pavilion in 
a field with merry maidens all about it, he loitered 
there until a tempest tore the pavilion from the 
tenting-pin and blew his maids about with all 
discomfort. Then he grew doubtful of spiritual 
realities — the usual course — cynical of sacred 



i8o Tennyson 

ecstasies and holy visions, and vowed hencefor- 
ward to be bhnd and deaf to holy virgins and 
their extravagancies. And when on his return to 
Arthur's court he told the King his failure and 
his apostasy — 

"Deafer," said the blameless King, 
"Gawain, and blinder unto holy things, 
Hope not to make thyself by idle vows. 
Being too blind to have desire to see." 

After this, so the story runs in the later "Idylls," 
Gawain fell into deep and deeper excess of 
sensualism, by his lack of truth and honor 
becoming the instrument of a younger knight's 
undoing ("Pelleas and Ettarre"), and at last 
appearing, a ghost, to Arthur ("The Passing of 
Arthur") wailing out the vanity of a life of pleas- 
ure in contrast with the sure reward that is 
reserved for the people of God: 

"Hail, King! to-morrow thou shalt pass away. 
Farewell! there is an isle of rest for thee. 
And I am blown along a wandering wind, 
And hollow, hollow, hollow all delight." 

In deep contrast to these, however — the 
Nun, Galahad, Percivale, Bors, Lancelot, and 
Gawain — another type of religious experience 
is embodied in the monk Ambrosius, to whom 
Percivale tells the story of the Quest, and in the 
King himself — Tennyson's conception of ideal 
manhood. The monk, good man, within the 



Idylls of the King i8i 

narrow range of his daily duties knew nothing 
of marvels and mysteries like the Grail, save as 
he read in books. But nevertheless he found, 
through the performance in humble wise of the 
common tasks of his order and his ministrations 
to the little folk who dwelt within the thorp 
that lay plastered like a martin's nest against 
his monastery walls, whatever of spiritual suste- 
nance and comfort he had need. And finally, the 
King: he could not leave his realm to seek for 
mystic visions, but abode at home; nor, as he 
declares, might he 

wander from the allotted field 
Before his work be done; but, being done, 

he cries, 

"Let visions of the night or of the day- 
Come, as they will; and many a time they come, 
Until this earth he walks on seems not earth, 
This light that strikes his eyeball is not light, 
This air that smites his forehead is not air 
But vision — yea, his very hand and foot — 
In moments when he feels he cannot die, 
And knows himself no vision to himself, 
Nor the high God a vision, nor that One 
Who rose again." ^ 

This, then, is the paramount principle of the 
symbolism of "The Holy Grail," the Reality of 
the Unseen and of its manifold manifestations 
to various types of character — to each according 

^Cf. pp. I02, 103. 



1 82 Tennyson 

to his need, according to his deed, and the purity 
of his spiritual passion, to some through holy 
quests and mystic visions, to some in inward 
peace and quietude of soul, and to others still in 
the glowing revelation that attends the sense 
of duty done, of work accomplished. 

On the other hand, in sharp contrast to this, 
Tennyson has portrayed in "Balin and Balan'' 
the consequences in character and influence when 
religion becomes corrupted by superstition and 
tainted by the practice of a vulgar and insincere 
asceticism. It is found in the story of Pellam, 
once a Christless foe of Arthur's, who, having seen 
that Arthur prospered in the name of Christ, 

Took, as in rival heat, to holy things, 

traced his descent from Joseph of Arimathea, 
boasted himself as purer than the King — 

Eats scarce enow to keep his pulse abeat; 
Hath push'd aside his faithful wife, nor lets 
Or dame or damsel enter at his gates 
Lest he should be polluted, 

as Arthur's messengers report; worshiped shrines 
and wonders, 

Thorns of the crown and shivers of the cross, 

the Roman spear that pierced the side of Christ, 
relics of the saints — one scarce could spy the 
Christ for Saints in Pellam's chapel — forewent 
all business of the world lest heavenly things 



Idylls of the King 183 

be defiled by earthly uses. When Arthur sent 
demanding payment of the tribute due, accord- 
ingly, he referred the messengers to his son. But 
this son, Garlon, is the secret demon of the wood, 
mouthing foulness, sneering at purity and truth 
and honor, who consorted with the harlot in the 
mouth of hell and smote from behind whatever 
knight might pass his way — a type of what in 
Tennyson's view, as has been seen, is the certain 
fruit of those religious practices that separate 
themselves from the practical affairs of life. 

Moreover, under the impulse of the poet's con- 
ception of the spiritual nature of man and the 
reality of his religious experience, various other 
phases of spiritual truth — sometimes in the form 
of pure allegory, but generally under suggestions 
of a perfect symbolism — he has associated with 
other features of the Arthurian story. In 1869, 
for example, side by side with **The Coming of 
Arthur" and "The Holy Grail," the tale of 
"Pelleas and Ettarre" appeared, a tragedy of 
native and ingenuous idealism fallen upon evil 
times — the "Idyll" represents the period when 
sin had entered the city of the King and corrupted 
his people — and turned to wrath and shame and 
hate through the treasons of those in whom it 
trusted and the lusts of those whom it took to be 
pure. Here the innocence of Pelleas, one of the 



184 Tennyson 

young knights taken by Arthur to fill the gap left 
by the Holy Quest, is disillusionized by the reck- 
less cynicism and sensuality of Ettarre, for whom 
he fought the tourney, and the baseness of 
Gareth, in whom he put his faith as a brother 
knight. On the other hand, "Gareth and Ly- 
nette" (1872), with more of allegory and richer 
symbolism, presents the obverse of the picture: 
it is the story of young Gareth in the morning 
of Arthur's reign when all the world was fresh 
and clean and all the knights were true; the story 
of his burning passion for the service of the King, 
his joy in even the humblest tasks — since thereby 
he knew he might become a knight of his — his 
triumph over the pride of life and scorn of men, 
and his final victory over all the vain allurements 
of the flesh and the temptations that beset the 
soul in the tangled and winding ways of the 
world. 

In part the "Idyll" is an allegory of "the war 
of Time against the soul of man,'' and the poet 
suggests the key through the sculptured figures 
on the rock before a hermit's cave: 

"Phosphorus," then "Meridies" — "Hesperus" — 
"Nox" — "Mors," beneath five figures, armed men, 
Slab after slab, their faces forward all, 
And running down the Soul, a Shape that fled 
With broken wings, torn raiment and loose hair, 
For help and shelter to the hermit's cave. 



Idylls of the King 185 

One by one at the successive river fords Gareth 
met the knights who, each in the guise of one of 
the hermit's personifications, beleaguered the 
Lady Lyonors in her castle: first Sir Morning- 
Star, armed in blue arms v^ith shield of blue 
whereon the morning star was blazed — and him 
he quickly overthrew, for easy is it for youth to 
overcome the sins of life's early day; next at the 

second river-loop, 
Huge on a huge red horse, and all in mail 
Bumish'd to blinding, shone the Noon-day Sun 
Beyond a raging shallow, 

but him also with small delay Gareth vanquished; 
four strokes they struck, and as the Sun 

Heaved up a ponderous arm to strike the fifth, 
The hoof of his horse slipt in the stream, the stream 
Descended, and the Sun was wash'd away. 

But when he reached the third ford of the river, 
spanned by a bridge of treble bow, he found the 
Star of Evening armed and wrapped in hardened 
skins that turned the blade of any sword. They 
fought a hard and deadly contest; Sir Gareth's 
sword was shattered at the hilt, and forth 

that other sprang, 
And, all unknightlike, writhed his wiry arms 
Around him, till he felt, despite his mail, 
Strangled, but straining ev'n his uttermost 
Cast, and so hvu-l'd him headlong o'er the bridge 
Down to the river. 



1 86 Tennyson 

So Gareth fought and won; but the sins of age, 
hardened into habit, may not lightly be cast aside. 
But when he faced the last grim phantom at dead 
of night beside the Castle Perilous, Sir Mors, 

High on a nightblack horse, in nightblack arms, 
With white breast-bone, and barren ribs of death, 
And crown'd with fleshless laughter, — 

lo, as he struck and split the skull and clove the 
helm, there issued out of it the bright face of a 
blooming boy — for Death itself is but the entrance 
to a fairer life. 

And about this allegory of spiritual warfare 
Tennyson has thrown a veil of lovely symbolism, 
in the picture of Gareth and his eagerness to follow 
Arthur, his willingness to serve as kitchen-knave 
if thus his mother might consent to let him go to 
Camelot, his patience in the face of scorn and 
contumely, his chivalry and kindliness of heart. 
But most of all it enriches the story of Gareth's 
first view of Arthur's city with its suggestion of 
the ever-shifting forms of spiritual truth to 
human sense, changing and ever forming again, 
melting like clouds into air and again embodying 
itself in newer figures to the faculties of men. 
To his eyes 

At times the summit of the high city flashed; 
At times the spires and turrets half-way down 
Prick'd thro' the mist; at times the great gate shone 
Only, that open'd on the field below: 
Anon, the whole fair city had disappear 'd. 



Idylls of the King 187 

Then those who followed Gareth were amazed, 
fearing that it was a city of enchantment, or that 
there was no such city anywhere, but all a vision. 
But an ancient man to whom he told their wonder 
and their doubt, admonished him: 

"Take thou the truth as thou hast told it me. 
For truly as thou sayest, a Fairy King 
And Fairy Queens have built the city, son; 
They came from out a sacred mountain cleft 
Toward the sunrise, each with harp in hand, 
And built it to the music of their harps. 
And, as thou sayest, it is enchanted, son, 
For there is nothing in it as it seems 
Saving the King; tho' some there be that hold 
The King a shadow, and the city real:^ 
Yet take thou heed of him, for, so thou pass 
Beneath this archway, then wilt thou become 
A thrall to his enchantments, for the King 
Will bind thee by such vows, as is a shame 
A man should not be bound by, yet the which 
No man can keep ; but, so thou dread to swear, 
Pass not beneath this gateway, but abide 
Without, among the cattle of the field. 
For an ye heard a muisc, like enow 
They are building still, seeing the city is built 
To music, therefore never built at all. 
And therefore built for ever." 

Likewise, in the description of the gateway to 
the city — a passage of pure allegory — Tennyson 
has symbolized his conception that religion is the 
keystone of society, and that, though the forms 

'Tennyson has remarked- "Camelot, a city of shadowy palaces, is 
everywhere symbolic of the gradual growth of human beliefs and 
institutions, and of the spiritual development of man." Cf. Alfred, 
Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, vol. ii, p. 129. 



1 88 Tennyson 

of human institutions may change with the 
changing ideals of men, and even the rites and 
ceremonies in which from age to age men clothe 
the religious principle may likewise vary, yet the 
vital essence is the same — 

For barefoot on the keystone, which was lined 
And rippled like an ever- fleeting wave, 
The Lady of the Lake stood : all her dress 
Wept from her sides as water flowing away; 
But like the cross her great and goodly arms 
Stretch' d under all the cornice and upheld. 

From both her hands fell drops of water — baptism 
and blessing; from one was hung the sword of the 
spirit and from one the censer of prayer and 
praise, "either worn with wind and storm," and 
upon her breast floated the sacred fish — the 
ancient symbol of her faith in Christ and all he 
came to teach. On either side of her, too, was 
carved the history of that age-long struggle of 
the soul with flesh — ^ 

And in the space to left of her, and right, 

Were Arthur's wars in weird devices done, 

New things and old co-twisted, as if Time 

Were nothing, so inveterately, that men 

Were giddy gazing there ; and over all 

High on the top were those three Queens, the friends 

Of Arthur, who should help him at his need. 



^Another symbolic representation of Arthur's wars, that is, of 
the progress of the race in civilization, is found in the description 
of the sculpture on the hall of Arthur, in "The Holy Grail": 

And four great zones of sculpture, set betwixt 
With many a mystic symbol, gird the hall : 



Idylls of the King 189 

Moreover, the twofold ethical theme of the 
warfare of the soul, individually and historically, 
against the passions of the beast, which is thus 
suggested by the tale of Gareth, is unfolded and 
developed under various forms in the complete 
series of the "Idylls" as well as in separate inci- 
dents here and there. 

In the elaboration of this thread, with the 
publication in 1885 of "Balin and Balan,*' the 
personality of Vivien assumes a new importance. 
She becomes a type of harlotry and womanly dis- 
honor, the embodiment of whatever is sensual 
and alluring in the flesh. Born of rebellion and 
cradled in death, as she says, reared in the court 
of Mark, where she learned all evil, she slid 
among the knights of Arthur like a serpent in 
the grass, scattering venom, slander, malice, 
and evil hints; went about the woodland alleys 
singing her song to acclaim the appetites: 

"The fire of Heaven is lord of all things good, 
And starve not thou this fire within thy blood, 
But follow Vivien thro' the fiery flood! 
The fire of Heaven is not the flame of Hell!"* 



And in the lowest beasts are slaying men, 
And in the second men are slaying beasts, 
And on the third are warriors, perfect men, 
And on the fourth are men with growing wings, 
And over all one statue in the mold 
Of Arthur. 

^Cf. the words of the pagan priests among whom Sir Bors suffered, 
as given in "The Holy Grail " and discussed on p. 176. 



190 Tennyson 

To her fool she prophesied, 

"This old sun-worship, boy, will rise again. 
And beat the cross to earth, and break the King 
And all his Table;" 

with her sneers and hes she goaded BaHn to his 
death; and with her wiles enticed Merlin to the 
forest, where she won from him the secret charm, 
and at last with woven paces and waving hands 
closed him in the hollow oak and left him there 

as dead, 
And lost to life and nse and name and fame. 

In connection with this theme, also, Tennyson 
has portrayed the vanity of worldly pleasure, the 
weariness and restless discontent of a life that is 
spent for the things of earth, and the varying 
fortunes of the spirit's battle with the lusts of 
flesh, with passion, and every form of evil — themes 
which appear in the shorter poems that have 
been examined and are skillfully interwoven with 
the Arthurian tales. There is, for example, the 
story of Balin, whose hot passions and fierce, 
uncurbed anger were his bane, but who thought 
that by taking the Queen's Crown Royal as cog- 
nizance upon his shield to remind him of his fault 
he might prevail against his heats and violence. 
But when he learned the Queen was false, and 
Vivien mocked his guilelessness with her tale of 
utter shame, his rage blazed up again — 



Idylls of the King 191 

he cast on earth the shield, 
Drove his mail'd heel athwart the royal crown, 
Stampt all into defacement; 

and blinded by his wrath he fought and slew in 
ignorance his brother Balan, at whose hand also he 
was wounded to the death unrecognized. There, 
too, is the story of the Red Knight, an apostate 
who established a rebel throne far to the North, 
where he swore his knights counter to the vows 
of the King — he, it seems, had been a knight of 
Arthur's but had lost his faith through the faith- 
lessness of many of his brother knights and 
changed his loyalty to disloyalty. But when 
Arthur met him on the field of war, he 

deign'd not use of word or sword, 
But let the drunkard, as he stretch 'd from horse 
To strike him, overbalancing his bulk, 

fall face downward in the mire — borne down by 
the weight of his own gross nature. 

So likewise in the tragic tale of Lancelot and 
Guinevere not only a definite ethical aim but a 
rich spiritual theme is apparent, in the delineation 
of that inward strife that left deep marks upon the 
face of Lancelot, and of the gradual awakening of 
the conscience of the Queen. Most of all in this 
connection is their story of significance as pre* 
senting with fine dramatic effect and imaginative 
insight the subjective workings of sin — the dullness 



192 Tennyson 

and languor of spirit, the jealousy and satiety of 
unholy love, and the bitterness of self-reproach 
for accomplished evil. As for Lancelot, caught 
at birth from his mother's arms by the Lady 
of the Lake, who reared and taught him all her 
mysteries, though he dreamed of purity — 

The maiden Saint who stands with lily in hand, 

her face aglow with the light that flowed from 
the spiritual lily that she held — yet he was lured 
again and again to his sin by the many-hued, 
deep-folded roses in the Queen's garden. But he 
could not sin and be "the sleeker for it" — rather 

His mood was often like a fiend, and rose 
And drove him into wastes and solitudes 
For agony. 

So, too, the Queen — 

the Powers that tend the soul, 
To help it from the death that cannot die, 
And save it even in extremes, began 
To vex and plague her; 

grim faces, dread phantoms, and vague spiritual 
fears haunted her in the night, and when she slept 
dreams woke her with their horror — 

for then she seem'd to stand 
On some vast plain before a setting sun, 
And from the sun there swiftly made at her 
A ghastly something, and its shadow flew 
Before her, till it touch'd her, and she tum'd — • 
When lo! her own, that broadening from her feet, 
And blackening, swallow'd all the land, and in it 
Far cities burnt. 



Idylls of the King 193 

It is, however, in "The Last Tournament" that 
Tennyson has touched with greatest power the 
theme of the pain and ennui of a life of sin and the 
brutality which a general sensualism is certain 
to work upon society — the action set amid the 
roll of autumn thunder, wet wind, 

and yellowing leaf, 
And gloom and gleam, and shower. 

It is a dreadful irony, this Tournament of the 
Dead Innocence, instituted by the Queen in 
memory of a dead child with a prize to be won by 
the purest knight for the purest maiden of the 
court. But Lancelot in Arthur's absence pre- 
sided over the Joust; in languorous mood and 
sighing weariedly he saw the laws that ruled the 
tourney broken but spoke not, and once he heard 
without rebuke a knight 

cast down 
Before his throne of arbitration cur,se 
The dead babe and the follies of the King; 

the prize was won by Tristram, the adulterer, for 
Isolt, an unfaithful wife, amid the mockery and 
the wrath of those who watched; and when the 
day was ended — all the white hangings of the 
streets soiled and wet — the women laughed and 
cried, 

"Praise the patient saints, 
Our one white day of Innocence hath past, 
The' somewhat draggled at the skirt. So be it." 



194 



Tennyson 



And with the night their revels grew so loud the 
Queen was constrained to break their sports, 

then slowly to her bower 
Parted, and in her bosom pain was lord. 

On the other hand, in marked contrast to the 
spiritual distress of Lancelot and the Queen — 
which issued at length for them in genuine 
repentance — is the bestial unconcern of Tristram 
for the consequences of his sin and the sin itself. 
A type of rude discourtesy and of the brutality 
that is ever the effect of sensualism, he passes 
through the story singing his wayward song, 
"Free love — free field — we love but while we may" — 

sudden death coming upon him at the hand of 
Mark while he acclaimed to the jaunty music of 
his harp his surrender to a low ideal: 

"Ay, ay, O ay — the winds that bend the brier! 
A star in heaven, a star within the mere! 
Ay, ay, O ay — a star was my desire, 
And one was far apart, and one was near: 
Ay, ay, O ay — the winds that bow the grass J 
And one was water and one star was fire, 
And one will ever shine and one will pass. 
Ay, ay, O ay — the winds that move the mere." 

Moreover, considered as a part of the whole 
series of "Idylls," "The Last Tournament" is a 
sad, stern picture of the failure, through the sin 
of his knights and his Queen, of Arthur's high 
and noble purposes; and after all this story of 



Idylls of the King 195 

Arthur, his ideaHsm, his long struggle with the 
lusts of the flesh, and the bitterness of his fail- 
ure, constitutes the single thread which binds to- 
gether these complex elements of spiritual truth 
into an epic unity. It reflects, also, that mood 
of spiritual dismay which sometimes overtook 
the poet in his contemplation of the apparent 
triumph of evil over good in individual life and 
human history, as it symbolizes, likewise, the 
principle of human development in which, as has 
been seen, Tennyson trusted most for the future 
of the race — that, though the wave may recede and 
advance, yet it moves ever forward and upward. 
This principle illuminates even the darkness of 
this "one white day of Innocence" as it is revealed 
in the loyalty of one, though a King's Fool, to 
the King's ideals. Therefore, little Dagonet re- 
fused to dance to Tristram's harping, but said: 

"I have wallow'd, I have wash'd — the world 
Is flesh and shadow — I have had my day. 
The dirty nurse, Experience, in her kind 
Hath foul'd me — an I wallow'd then I wash'd — 
I have had my day and my philosophies — 
And thank the Lord I am King Arthur's fool," — 

no fool's wisdom, but truth and the promise of 
a better order. 

Thus the "Idylls of the King" are the embodi- 
ment in beautiful symbolism and vivid allegory 
of the poet's faith in the essential spirituality of 



196 Tennyson 

the universe and of man, as that faith, it has 
been seen, became clearer and more certain to 
his consciousness under the reaction of his heart 
against the im^pHcations of materialism; the ex- 
pression, as well, of those moods of dejection and 
spiritual discouragement with which at times the 
course of human history and the presence of evil 
in individual life overwhelmed him; the concrete 
representation through narrative and the action 
of story of those strong ethical principles that 
underlie all his thinking. The passionate cer- 
tainty of his belief in the reality of the unseen, 
which found an utterance in "The Higher Pan- 
theism" and "The Voice and the Peak," is the 
spiritual principle that glows in "The Coming 
of Arthur" and "The Holy Grail"; the spiritual 
delight of the quest for the ideal, which is the 
theme of "The Voyage" and "Ulysses," is like- 
wise the theme of the story of "Gareth and 
Lynette"; the power of sensuality to embitter 
life and imbrute the man, as it is portrayed in 
"The Vision of Sin," finds vivid representation 
again in "Pelleas and Ettarre" and ''The Last 
Tournament"; the hopelessness and bitterness of 
spirit with which, in "Locksley Hall Sixty Years 
After" and "Vastness," the imagination dwelt 
upon the somber spectacle of the bearing down 
of noble purpose by lust and passion, upon the 



Idylls of the King 197 

contradictions of the social order of his time, and 
the broken hopes of men, colors again "The Last 
Tournament"; the ghastly sense of the emptiness 
of life spent for pleasure, and the hideousness of 
the subjective experience of sensualism, repre- 
sented in "The Promise of May," appear again in 
the story of Lancelot and Guinevere; the cry 
of ruined effort, heroic but futile, heard once and 
again in the poet's ov^n experience, becomes artic- 
ulate in the words of the dying Arthur — inserted 
in "The Passing of Arthur" in 1872: 

"I found Him in the shining of the stars, 
I mark'd Him in the flowering of his fields, 
But in His ways with men I find Him not. 
I waged His wars, and now I pass and die. 

For I, being simple, thought to work His will, 
And have but stricken with the sword in vain." 

Indeed; as has been said at the beginning of this 
chapter, in the "Idylls of the King" is found 
reflected under every phase of the Arthurian story 
the full and complete circle of Tennyson's ethi- 
cal and spiritual philosophy — his growing hopes, 
his increasing faith, and enlarging purpose as 
they are likewise recorded in the shorter poems 
of the same period. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE LAST POEMS OF FAITH 

Several weeks after the death of Tennyson, 
in October, 1892, his last volume of verse was 
given to the wo rid ^ — a slender sheaf of gleanings 
from autumn fields. Sacred it is, reflecting the 
aged poet's most intimate meditations at the very 
limit of his earthly life. "I must write what I 
am thinking about, and I have not much time," 
he said to those who during his last years asked 
him to write on everyday topics. 

His imagination now loved to linger upon the 
mysteries of life that once had troubled him, upon 
the great mystery of the other world which he 
was soon to enter, in which he felt assured he 
should find all mysteries resolved in the light of 
God, and upon which he had brooded even from 
the days of his early sorrow. The calm assurance 
of "The Ancient Sage" had now become his 
fixed estate; the uncertainties of mind, the fears, 
and the spiritual dismay which had overtaken him 
at times during the period of the controversy with 

^He died at Aldworth, Surrey, on the 6th, being in his eighty- 
fourth year, and was buried in Westminster Abbey on the 1 2th. On 
the 28th his last volume. The Death of (Enone, Akbar's Dream, and 
Other Poems, was published. 

198 



The Last Poems of Faith 199 

materialism have gone forever — the white light 
of perfect faith plays upon the graves of buried 
doubts. Even though he contemplates again the 
problems of civilization with its contradictions 
and glaring denials, the slow progress of the race 
toward moral excellence, he writes "The Dawn" 
and *'The Making of Man" — the significance of 
which in the scheme of his philosophy has already 
been suggested.^ He writes also **The Dreamer" 
— the last poem finished — in which he hears the 
voice of the Age cry out its sense of the evils of 
men and its loss of the vision of youth — and here 
the poet strikes finally the note of despair that is 
heard in "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After"; but 
a clear promise of victory answers now the grief 
of the World, as the great cosmic forces unite to 
declare the ultimate fulfillment of an eternal 
purpose, and the final merging of evil into good. 
The presence of sin and suffering in nature and 
human life — a problem that vexed him sorely in 
the days of "In Memoriam" — and the contra- 
dictions involved in human creeds that brought 
grief and perplexity upon him — as the record is 
found in "Despair" and "Locksley Hall Sixty 
Years After" — might again arise before his mind; 
but Faith, in accents firm and authoritative, now 
speaks her counsel, putting each doubt and fear 

>Cf. p. 97. 



200 Tennyson 

to rest, and urging patience: "Wait," she says 
in the poem **Faith," "for Death, the great 
revealer, to throw open the gates of life and 
heavenly wisdom." 

And so he awaited Death, with the unshaken 
confidence and serenity of hope to which he 
had given utterance, under familiar and beautiful 
imagery, in "Crossing the Bar" (1889) — that 
perfect lyric which, in accordance with his own 
direction, is put last in all editions of his poetry. 
Even when he stood, as did the Psalmist before 
him, beneath the majesty of the starry heavens 
and felt the utter nothingness of his tiny spark 
of being amid the "rush of Suns and roll of sys- 
tems," yet his hope of a personal immortality was. 
undisturbed even to the end.^ 

But more than this: not only did the aged poet 
during his last days await Death with the calm 
confidence of one who 

hoped to see his Pilot face to face, 
When he had crost the bar, — 

the Pilot being "that Divine and Unseen, who is 

^" I have opened it," he exclaimed as he lay dying — his last words. 
His son says of them; "Whether this referred to the Shakespeare, 
opened by him at 

'Hang there like fruit, my soul, 
Till the tree die,' 

which he always called among the tenderest lines in Shakespeare ; or 
whether one of his last poems ( 'God and the Universe"), of which 
he was fond, was running through his head I cannot tell." Cf. 
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, vol. ii, p. 429. 



The Last Poems of Faith 201 

always guiding us'' — but he awaited Death with 
that eagerness of spirit which through a long 
lifetime he had felt in the pursuit of the Gleam. 
The far future always had been his goal, and it 
was no less his goal now at the end of life than 
in the early days of "The Voyage" and "Ulysses." 
The Gleam that had led him over the pleasant 
fields of youth, through the mists of doubt and 
grief, over the wintry fallows of age, still hovered 
before his vision 

There on the border 
Of boundless Ocean, 
And all but in Heaven. 

Therefore, he asked the silent-voiced phantoms 
that gathered about him in the night, the voices 
of the dead of other days, not to call him back in 
memory, "toward the lowland ways" behind him, 
but rather to call him forward toward the illimit- 
able heights of eternal life.^ For it remained his 
faith, as it had come to be his faith in the dark 
days of his early sorrow, that, as it is expressed 
in the "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Clar- 
ence and Avondale," the future life is one of 
never-ending progress. 

In this faith he died; and as he was pass- 
ing away his son spoke over him his own 
prayer, "God accept him! Christ receive him!" 

1" The Silent Voices." 



202 Tennyson 

because he knew that his father would have 
wished it. 

Significant, however, and rich as the volume 
is in its presentation of many of the different 
notes of spiritual confidence which the poet had 
struck before and in its final utterance of the sub- 
stance of that faith in which he lived and died, 
it is significant further as embodying in terms of 
philosophy his general attitude of mind and the 
results of his speculations. This is found in 
"Akbar's Dream" — a poem which was written to 
embody the teachings of an Eastern ruler and 
sage, but which likewise contains much that will 
be recognized as personal to the poet himself and 
characteristic of his habits of thought. There 
is his spirit of toleration, his belief that *'the 
essential feelings of religion subsist in utmost 
diversity of forms"; that, though forms are need- 
ful, yet they are but the garments in which the 
religious principle must clothe itself and which 
must be cast aside when outworn and no longer 
of service — a conception already familiar to the 
readers of *'In Memoriam." Here again he has 
given utterance to that hope which was with him 
amid the clash of creeds and the sense of the 
inadequacy of all finite forms of thought to 
express the infinite content of spiritual truth, the 
hope of that coming time which he foresaw, when 



The Last Poems of Faith 203 

divisions of race and creed should be lost in the 
union of all men in the love of truth and in uni- 
versal brotherhood. And, finally, no one can 
read the modest appraisement which Akbar 
passed upon his service to his age without the 
feeling that here Tennyson was speaking, with 
all humility, of that great service he also had 
rendered to the age in which he lived — a too 
modest estimate of a service which Benjamin 
Jowett, Master of Balliol and a lifelong friend, 
more justly appraised when he remarked during 
the last weeks of the poet's life, "Your poetry has 
an element of philosophy more to be considered 
than any regular philosophy in England." 



INDEX 



" Adam Bede," 98. 

Akbar's Dream, 132, 202, 

203, 
Ancient Sage, The, 79, 88, 96 

n., 102, 124-129, 154, 196. 
•• Apostles," The Society of, 

28. 
Arnold, M., 22, 31, lOO. 
Ayhner's Field, i43- 
Balin and Balan, I57, 182, 

183, 189. 
"Better Part, The," 100. 
Browning, Robert, 122 n. 
By an Evolutionist, 100, 104, 

137. 
Carlyle, Jane "Welsh, 15. 
Carlyle, Thomas, 25, 34, 150. 
Children's Hospital, In the, 

102, 112-114, 
"Christian Year, The," 25. 
Clarence and Avondale, Ode 

on the Death of the Duke of, 

201. 
Clough, Arthur Hugh, 21. 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 27, 

28, 34. 
Coming of Arthur, The, 79, 125 

n., 156, 159-166, 183, 196. 
Crossing the Bar, 166, 200. 
" Cry of the Children, The," 

149. 

Darwin, Charles, 30, 80, 91. 

Dawn, The, 97, i47 n., 199. 

Death of the Duke of Clarence 
and Avondale, Ode on the, 
201. 

Death of the Duke of Welling- 
ton, Ode on the, 103. 

Despair, 119-123, 199. 

Dora, 141. 

Dreamer, The, 199. 

Eliot, George, 33, 98, 100, io9- 



Enoch Arden, 141. 
"Epilogue" (to "Dramatis 

Personse "), 122 n. 
Evolutionist, By an, 100, 104, 

137. 
Faith, 200. 

Fitzgerald, Edward, 27, 36. 
Flight, The, 142. 
Flower in the Crannied Wall, 

82, 86, 87. 
Froude, J. A., 24, 
Gardener's Daughter, The, 141, 
Gareth and Lynette, 134, 157, 

184-188, 196. 
Gladstone, W. E., 28, 35. 
God and the Universe, 200 

n. 
Golden Year, The, 151, i53. 
Hallam, Arthur H., 28, 39, 40, 

42, 48, 107. 
Hare, Augustus, 14. 
Hare, Juhus, 27. 
Hare, Maria, 13. 
Heber, Reginald, 13. 
Higher Pantheism, The, 81, 

84-86, 196. 
Holy Grail, The, 79, "3, 128 

n., 156, 166-182, 183, 188 n., 

189 n., 196. 
Hospital, In the Children's, 

102, 112-114. 
Human Cry, The, go. 
Huxley, Thomas, 87. 
Idylls of the King, The, 79, 

108, 136, 139, 152, 155, 197. 
The Coming of Arthur, 
79, 125 n., 156, 159-166, 
183, 196. 
Gareth and Lynette, 134, 

157, 184-188, 196. 
Balin and Balan, I57, 
182, 183, 189. 



20s 



206 



Index 



The Holy Grail, 79, 103, 

128 n., 156, 166-182, 

183, 188 n., 189 n., 196. 

Pelleas and Ettarre, 156, 

180, 183, 196. 
The Last Tournament, 
136, 157, 193, 194, 195, 
196, 197. 
The Passing of Arthur, 

156, 166 n., 180, 197. 
To the Queen, 58. 
In Memoriain, 20, 22, 23, 29, 
35, 39-76, 90 n., 91, 92, 97, 
loi, 104, 105, 107, 125 n., 
128 n., 137, 142, 152, 155, 
199, 202. 
In the Children's Hospital, 

102, 112-114. 
" In Utnimque Paratus," 31. 
/. M. K., To, 17. 
Jowett, Benjamin, 203, 
7. 5., To, 40. 

Kant, "The Good Will," 137. 
Keble, John, 22. 
Kingsley, Charles, 15, 29, 34, 

35, 149, 150. 
Lady Clara Vere de Vere, 154. 
Last Tournament, The, 136. 

157, 193, 194-195, 196, 197. 
Locksley Hall, 27. 
Locksley Hall Sixty Years 
After, 93, 99, I33, i45, 146, 
147, 150, 151, 152, 154, 196, 
199. 
Lotos-Eaters, The, loS, 109, 
Making of Man, The, 108, 

109. 
Malory, Sir Thomas, 160. 
Maud, 93, 97, 122 n., 144 n., 

145, 146. 
Maurice, F. D., 28, 29, 35, 

i2i n, 
Maurice, To the Rev. F. D., 

35., 
Merlin and the Gleam, 139. 
Metaphysical Society,The, 81. 
Miller's Daughter, The, 141. 
Morris, Edwin, 142. 
Morte d' Arthur, 36-38. 



Mourner, On A, 40. 
Newman, John Henry, 19, 

21, 23 n. 
" New Sinai, The," 21 n. 
CEnone, 140. 
Ode on the Death of the Duke 

of Clarence and Avondale, 

201. 
Ode on the Death of the Dukt 

of Wellington, 193. 
Ode Sung at the Opening of the 

International Exhibition, 

151- 
On a Mourner, 40. 
" Origin of Species," 30. 
Oxford Movement, The, 19, 

22 n. 
Palace of Art, The, 108, 133. 
Pas sing of Arthur, The, 166 n., 

180, 197, 
Pelleas and Ettarre, 156, 180, 

183, 196. 
Prefatory Sonnet (to *' The 

Ninteenth Century "), 119 

n. 
Princess, The, 97, 141, 151. 
Promise of May, The, loi, 

112, 115-119, 142, 143, 197. 
" Qui Laborat, Orat," 21 n. 
Robertson, Frederick, 29, 

35. 
Romanes, G. J., 73 n., 87. 
Ruskin, John, 34, 149. 
Sea Dreams, 10, 144, 145. 
Sedgwick, A., 27. 
Silent Voices, The, 201 n. 
"Song of the Shirt, The," 149. 
Spencer, Herbert, 87, 
Stanley, Edward, 14. 
Sterling, John, 34. 
" Summum Pulchrum," 21 

n. 
Swinburne, Charles A., 31. 
" Teufelsdrockh," 82. 
To 7. M. K., 17. 
To J. S., 40. 
To The Rev. F. D. Maurice, 

35 n. 
Tractarians, The, 23. 



•i iL 



Index 



207 



Two Greetings, The, 88-90, 

125 n.j 159, 166 n. 
Two Voices, The, 21, 128 n,. 

129. 
Ulysses, 42, 105, 107, 138, 196, 

201. 
Vastness, 94-96, 196. 
de Vere, Aubrey, 141. 
" Vestiges of Creation, The," 

104. 
Vision of Sin, The, 108, 109- 

112, 135, 196. 



Voice and the Peak, The, 81, 

83, 84, 196. 
Voyage, The, 105, 106, 109, 

138, ig6, 201. 
Wages, 99. 
Wellington, Ode on the Death 

of, 103. 
Whewell, William, 27. 
Will, 137. 
Wordsworth, William, 98, 

140, 141. 
Wreck, The, 143. 







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